Group Members

IMG is an interdisciplinary group in Yale's Computer Science department. We are always looking for students passionate about advancing interactive computing technologies and robotics. For more information about joining our lab, see this page.

Faculty


Marynel Vázquez
Principal Investigator
Marynel's research focuses on advancing group Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). She investigates social group phenomena in HRI and develops perception and decision making algorithms to enable autonomous robot behavior. Marynel received her bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar in 2008, and obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Before joining Yale, Marynel was a collaborator of Disney Research and a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Stanford Vision & Learning Lab.

Graduate Students


Nathan Tsoi
CS PhD Student
Nathan is a 4th year PhD student working at the intersection of robotics and machine learning. His research aims to advance the effectiveness and robustness of robotic systems that interact with humans, with the ultimate goal of making robotic platforms more useful in the real world. Prior to Yale, he worked on research at Stanford University in the Stanford Vision & Learning Lab under Silvio Savarese, and worked on machine learning and data engineering at Sequoia.

Sydney Thompson
CS PhD Student
Sydney is a 4th year PhD student and is interested in modeling human social behaviors to enable more seamless interactions with robots. Sydney's current projects include studying methods for modeling robot social norm violations in group interactions. She is also working on a robot photographer at Yale to facilitate data collection for group interactions with robots.

Kate Candon
CS PhD Student
Kate is a 3rd year PhD student. She is interested in understanding how we can create robots that are more effectively able to help people. Her current research explores techniques to leverage implicit feedback humans provide naturally during interactions. She is excited about creating robots that can understand and adapt to the preferences of the humans they interact with, creating more positive experiences for users.

Austin Narcomey
CS PhD Student
Austin is a 2nd year PhD student. He earned a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford, where he previously conducted research under the advising of Fei-Fei Li of the Vision Lab and Michael Bernstein of the HCI Group and their joint PhD student Ranjay Krishna. Austin is interested in applying methods in deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to enable robots and AI agents to better collaborate with and adapt to unique and diverse users.

Qiping Zhang
CS PhD Student
Qiping is a 2nd year PhD student working on interactive machine learning and human-robot interaction. He is specifically interested in reinforcement learning from human feedback, as well as efficient robot learning of tasks and social rules via intelligent interactions with humans. Prior to joining Yale, he earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong, and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he conducted research in the Learning Agents Research Group advised by Peter Stone and Scott Niekum.

Sasha Lew
CS PhD Student
Sasha is a 1st year PhD student working on human-robot interactions in the wild. Before joining the PhD program, Sasha majored in Computing and the Arts at Yale in 2022.

Undergraduate Students


Brian Choi
CS and Math, '25

Grace Parmer
EE, '23

Alumni

Graduate Students

Yifan Li (CS M.S., '22)
Chenyu You (Lab rotation as part of BME PhD program, '19)
Jason Chen (CS M.S., '19)

Undergraduate Students

Solomon Gonzalez (ME, '23)
Megha Joshi (CS and Econ, '23)
Abhijit Gupta (CS and Applied Math, '23)
Christine Yang (CS and Comparative Literature, '23)
Alec Xiang (CS, '24)
Anjali Gupta (CS, '24)
Eden Gorevoy (CS, '23)
Joe Connolly (CS, '22)
Greg Schwartz (CS, '22)
Yofti Milkessa (Physics & CS, '22)
William Hu (CS, '21)
Mohamed Hussein (Rutgers CS, '21)
Sally Ma (CS, '21 - now at DeepMind)
Taesoo Daniel Lee (CS, '21 - now at PDT Partners)
Malak Khan (CS, '21 - now at UNIDO)
Olivia Fugikawa (CS, '24)
J. D. Zhao (CS, '23)
Jamie Large (CS & Math, '21)
Jeacy Espinoza (EECS, '22)
Allan Wu (CS and Math + English, '20)
Isabella Teng (CS, '20)
Ananya Parthasarathy (CS and Psych., '20)
Annie Gao (CS, '21)
Simon Mendelsohn (CS and Psych., '20 - now at Amazon)
Ileana Valdez (CS, '21)
Katharine Li (Art - Graphic Design, '21)
Antonio Cao (Physics & CS, '21)
Sarim Abbas (CS, '20)
Jared Weinstein (CS, '19 - now at Google)
Ngan Nvu (CS'19 - now at DeepMind)
Julia Lu (CS, '19)
Roland Huang (CS, '19 - now at Nuro)
Peter Zhou (CS, '19 - now cofounder of new startup)
Dibyatanoy Bhattacharjee (CS, '19)
Zen Tang (S&DS, '19 - now at Wayve)
Kendrick Umstattd (EE and CS, '19 - now at Google)
Devon Merlette (Computing & The Arts, '19)
Jack Wesson (Computing & Arts, '19)

High-School Students

C. Burton Lyng-Olsen (now undergraduate at Yale)
Neha Govil (now undergraduate at MIT)