Maja J Matarić Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics Director, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) Co-Director, Robotics Research Lab Senior Associate Dean for Research Viterbi School of Engineering (VSoE) University of Southern California Ph.D., Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, MIT, 1994

photo by Phil Channing,philchanning@cox.net

Projects: The Interaction Lab projects focus on assistive human-robot interaction. Under the umbrella of socially assistive robotics, we also pursue projects in humanoid control and learning through interaction, imitation and demonstration, and activity modeling for individuals, small groups, and crowds. My earlier work focused on synthesis and analysis of adaptive group behavior for distributed multi-robot control and learning. More information about our research projects is found here. Interested students should look here.

Methodology: With our reseach focus on real-time multi-modal assistive human-robot interaction, my group's efforts are brought together under the behavior-based methodology, using the notion of composable basis behaviors or primitives as building blocks for structuring complex systems, enabling real-time human-robot interaction, and reducing the dimensionality of the associated control and learning problems. In all projects, we evaluate our approaches and algorithms on physical robots and high-fidelity simulations, and conduct human-subjects experiments using rigorous experimental design and evaluation.

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