Sean Andrist
Principal Researcher
About
My research interests involve designing, building, and evaluating socially interactive technologies that are physically situated in the open world, particularly embodied virtual agents and robots. My goal is to enable natural language-based interactions with these embodied technologies that can both perceive and appropriately respond to human conversational verbal and nonverbal social cues. To accomplish that goal, I explore techniques to improve an agent’s awareness of the social context around it and couple that enhanced representation with behaviors that can improve the agent’s task and social capabilities, user acceptance, rapport, and in general enable these technologies to be better “citizens” of the environment they are embedded within.
You can find more information about my research and all recent publications on my personal website (opens in new tab).