Brian Scassellati

Congrats to Dr. Jake Brawer, my 15th PhD graduate! Jake's thesis shows how robots can understand ownership, learn causal models of tool use, and link human commands to learned representations.

Congratulations to Kayla Matheus, my 3rd year PhD student, for winning the Best Student Paper award at Ro-MAN 2022 for her design of Ommie, a robot that helps you practice deep breathing exercises to reduce anxiety and depression.

Congratulations to Dr. Meiying Qin, my 14th PhD student! Meiying built a system that allowed robots to use tools from only a few human examples, to transfer that knowledge to novel uses of the tool, and even to transfer learned skills from one robot to another.

Congratulations to Dr. Nicole Salomons who today became my 13th PhD graduate! Nicole demonstrated new algorithms for continuous skill estimation, the first example of people conforming to a group of robots, and on multiple in-home, multi-week robot deployments. Fantastic work!

Moderating a panel at the AI For Good series: twitter.com/ITU_AIForGood/…

Spent today talking to congressional staffers (and one Member) about the AI labor shortage, dataset availability, and K-12 education. I am disappointed that our representatives are more interested in talking than listening and angry that our legislative process is so broken.

Help kids fight social isolation with robots! Our group has a new free application to allow kids to play remotely - and we are giving away 200 robots to CT families! Visit RobotsForGood.Yale.edu for details. Please feel free to circulate!

@MeaganPhelan For those asking, our project for 5-12 year old children to connect with their friends during social isolation will soon be available for free download at RobotsForGood.yale.edu.

"I think everybody's been feeling the effects of staying at home, of social isolation...My group will soon put out an application for 5-12-yr old kids, to control a robot in another child's home. We've tested this & seen kids play hide-and-seek with each other, and more," @DrScaz

My first lead author publication is out in @PNASNews now! Huge thank you to my amazing co-authors @sstrohkorb, @whatsmalteupto, @DrScaz, and @NAChristakis. Article here: bit.ly/3cLJGh5 Press release here: bit.ly/38z6D3t.