You R. Name

My research aims to develop autonomous systems that can seamlessly integrate into complex, human-centric environments. Motivated by the critical need for mutual understanding between humans and autonomous systems, my work focuses on two key thrusts:

• Modeling human behavior to enable robots to interpret human intentions, actions, and mental states, ensuring safe and effective interactions in dynamic, real-world environments.
• Designing explainable decision-making frameworks that make autonomous systems’ behavior intuitive and transparent to human users, fostering trust and collaboration in both dyadic and group settings.

In my current postdoc at CMU, I investigate how robots should communicate their decision-making process, abstracted as reward function weights, in human-robot groups. My work focuses on designing machine teaching frameworks that adaptively explain robot behavior to groups by modeling their individual and aggregated group beliefs using particle filters. These closed-loop strategies select demonstrations based on evolving team understanding, improving policy learning. I also study how humans respond to unexpected or faulty system behaviors, particularly in automated vehicles. Using multimodal data including facial expressions, audio, and physiological signals I develop techniques to detect subtle emotional cues such as surprise, confusion, and frustration. This line of work enables real-time identification of system-user expectation mismatches and trust breakdowns, laying the foundation for behavior-aware, trust-sensitive autonomy that can adaptively respond to user needs.

Education

• Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2021.
• M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2018.
• B.E. in Production Engineering at Anna University, India in 2013.

Research Interests

human behavior modeling, explainable decision-making, group human-AI/robot interactions, trust in AI/robots, interaction-aware control, human-AI/robot communication, human-AI/robot teaming, socially intelligent agents