Welcome to the website of the Interactive Machines Group (IMG)!
IMG is an interdisciplinary research group led by Marynel Vázquez in Yale's Computer Science Department.
Our group studies fundamental problems in Human-Robot Interaction, which often results in exploring research directions that can advance Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics and applied Machine Learning more broadly. In particular, our current research agenda is focused on creating a new generation of robots that can effectively adapt to varied social contexts, engaging and sustaining interactions with multiple users in dynamic human environments like our university campus or museums. We spend our day-to-day building novel computational tools, prototyping interactive systems, and running user experiments to both better understand interactions with technology and validate our methods. More information about current research directions can be found in the research page.
Want to interact with robots? Information about ongoing studies can be found in the studies page.
News
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IMG participates in HAI'22 and CORL'22
Kate Candon, Debasmita Ghose and Sarah Gillet will be presenting new work in New Zealand! Their presentations will be about how people perceive helping behaviors from an agent, how robots can learn visual object representations tailored to human requirements, and how a robot can learn who to address during group interactions. -
New NeurIPS 2022 publication
IMG students develop novel approach to approximate metrics based on confusion matrix values (like the F-β score) and use them to train binary neural network classifiers. The approach works particularly well with imbalanced datasets, as shown in a new NeurIPS paper. -
Kayla Matheus receives the Best Student Paper award at RO-MAN 2022
Kayla Matheus, third year PhD student, received the Best Student Paper award at the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2022). Her paper presents Ommie, a novel robot that supports deep breathing practices for the purposes of anxiety reduction. -
New RA-L paper about SEAN 2.0! Checkout the related SEANavBench benchmark
New RA-L paper describes our new Social Environment for Autonomous Navigation 2.0, which is now easier to use and has more complex crowd motion. Also, the related SEANavBench benchmark for social robot navigation is now open after being announced at ICRA'22. -
IMG Celebrates Recent Achievements
Kate Candon received a Honorable Mention from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program and Marynel Vázquez was awarded an NSF FRR CAREER Award! -
IMG Participates in HRI 2022
Several students will be presenting their latest work in the main HRI conference and associated workshops.
Lab Location
Yale University, AKW 400
51 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511