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

Research goals: My research is aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people, especially those with special needs. I am inspired by the dual goals of 1) gaining novel insights into human behavior and cognition through human-machine interaction and 2) developing robotic systems capable of providing personalized assistance individually (in convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education) or in teams (in habitat monitoring and emergency response). My Interaction Lab focuses on socially assistive systems capable of aiding people through social interaction rather than through physical contact; we are currently working with stroke patients, children with autism spectrum disorders, and individual suffering from dementia/Alzheimer's Disease. Our research involves developing technology-assisated intervention methods that use intelligent human-robot interaction (HRI), control, and learning in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments by integrating multi-modal perception, communication, and interaction with users. To address the inherently multidisciplinary challenges of this research area, our work draws on theories, models, and collaborations from neuroscience, cognitive science, social science, health sciences, and education.

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.


Contact Information

Computer Science Department
University of Southern California
Office: Ronald Tutor Hall (RTH) 407
Mailing address: 3650 McClintock Avenue, OHE 200
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1450 USA
(213) 740-4520 office (rarely effective, email is much better)
(213) 821-5696 shared fax (please use a cover sheet)
(213) 740-6245 lab (you will reach my students)
(213) 740-1169 admin assistant (adrianac (at) usc (dot) edu)
(213) 740-0622 dean's office asst (vsoe.research.admin (at) vsoe.usc.edu)
mataric (at) usc (dot) edu


Report problems to webmaster (at) robotics.usc.edu