Welcome to Social Robotics at Yale!
Human behavior has been studied from many perspectives and at many scales. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience each use different methodologies, scope, and evaluation criteria to understand aspects of human behavior. Computer science, and in particular robotics, offers a complementary perspective on the study of human behavior. Our research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Our work uses computational modeling and socially interactive robots in different methodological roles to explore questions about social development that are difficult or impossible to assail using methods of other disciplines.
Lab Meetings
Lab meetings are held every Monday at 4:00pm. If you are interested in joining our lab, please contact Brian Scassellati for location information and consider attending a meeting.
Recent Lab News
January 2012
Henny Admoni was selected to participate in the HRI Pioneers workshop, to be held in conjunction with HRI 2012 in July in Boston, Massachusetts. This highly selective workshop is the premiere venue for student research in the field of human-robot interaction.
August 2011
Justin Hart's paper was accepted for presentation at the 11th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, to be held in October in Bled, Slovenia.
April 2011
A paper by Henny Admoni, Mariya Toneva, Caroline Bank and Josh Tan was accepted for presentation at the 33rd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2011), to be held in July in Boston, Massachusetts.
January 2011
Jenny Liu, a high school intern with the lab, has been named one of the 40 Intel Science Talent Search finalists. The Intel Science Talent Search is the nation's most prestigious science research competition for high school seniors.
December 2010
Two papers from the Yale Social Robotics Lab were accepted for presentation at the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2011), to be held in March in Lausanne, Switzerland.
March 2010
On March 27, the Social Robotics, GRAB, and HMI labs hosted 250 gifted middle and high school students and their families for a day of lectures, seminars, and workshops on robotics research at Yale. The program, organized in conjuction with Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth, was widely hailed as a resounding success. A special thanks to all of the student and staff volunteers!
March 2010
Congratulations to Jenny Liu, who took first place at the Connecticut Junior Science and Humanities Symposium! Her presentation, titled "Emotional Models Promote Human-Robot Interaction," was also chosen by her fellow presenters to receive the People's Choice Award.
December 2009
Congratulations to Elaine Short, Justin Hart, and Michelle Vu! Their paper, "No Fair!! An Interaction with a Cheating Robot" was accepted for presentation at the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2010), to be held in March in Osaka, Japan.
December 2009
Congratulations to Chris Crick, who finished his thesis, accepted a postdoctoral position at Brown, and moved to Providence, all within a matter of weeks! (The rest of us are still not entirely sure how that happened.)