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.

Postdocs


Houston Claure
Postdoc
Houston is a postdoc working at the intersection of of human-robot interaction (HRI), human-computer interaction (HCI), and artificial intelligence (AI). His research fuses the psychology of fairness with robot decision-making to foster effective collaboration between humans and robots in team settings. He received my Ph.D. from Cornell University in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, where he was advised by Dr. Malte Jung and worked in the Robots in Groups Lab.

Graduate Students


Sydney Thompson
CS PhD Student
Sydney is a 6th 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 5th 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 4th 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 4th 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 3rd 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.

Etiosa Omeike
CS PhD Student
Etiosa is a 2nd year PhD student working on personalization and adaptation in human-robot social contexts. Before joining the PhD program, Etiosa earned his B.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Princeton University.

Undergraduate Students


Brian Choi
CS and Math, '25

Grace Parmer
EE, '23

Alumni

Graduate Students

Nathan Tsoi (CS PhD, '25)
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)