Team | Human-Centered AI and Robotics Group

Meet the human and robot members of the Rice HCAIR team!
If you're interested in being part of our team, please check out the Join page.

Principal Investigator

Vaibhav Unhelkar

Director, Human-Centered AI and Robotics Group

Vaibhav Unhelkar is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. He is interested in developing computational foundations of artificially intelligent systems that enhance human capability. He holds a Ph.D. in Autonomous Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). Vaibhav serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and, before joining Rice, served as a researcher at Google X.

Graduate Researchers

Peizhu (Pam) Qian

Human-Robot Interaction, Robot Transparency, Explainable AI

Pam Qian's research develops interactive algorithms to explain robot behavior to human users. A Computer Science bachelor from Simmons University, Pam is particulary interested in using AI to enhance access to education. In her ongoing work, she is collaborating with the Houston Methodist Hospital to explore applications of robots for nursing education.

Sangwon Seo

Multi-Agent Imitation Learning, Human-AI Collaboration

Sangwon Seo develops computational techniques to improve both human-human and human-robot teamwork. He holds a Masters in Bioengineering and Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University. In his ongoing work, Sangwon is collaborating with cardiac surgeons to develop an AI Coach for surgical training.

Liubove Orlov Savko

Imitation Learning, Human-Autonomy Teaming

Liubove Orlov-Savko develops imitation learning algorithms to model humam behavior for enabling human-robot interaction. A particular challenge that she focuses on is to learn these models from small semi-supervised datasets of human behavioral and physiological data. A Fulbright scholar, Liubove is a graduate of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and has previously worked as a data scientist and software developer.

Abhinav Jain

Imitation Learning, Program Synthesis (co-advised by Prof. Christopher Jermaine)

Abhinav Jain works at the intersection of imitation learning and program synthesis, and is exploring data efficient approaches to train robots. Before joining Rice, Abhinav worked at the IBM Research Labs and completed his undergraduate education at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Bill Qian

Human-Robot Interaction, Multimodal Machine Learning

Bill Qian is interested in human-robot interaction, and is currenttly working on using latent states information (a person’s workload, trust, etc.) to help us better understand how a human interacts with a robot.