Organizers

Dr. Lydia E. Kavraki is the Kenneth and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing and professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering. She also serves as the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. Kavraki works broadly in robotics, computational biomedicine, and physical AI. Kavraki is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), Academia Europaea, and the Academy of Athens. She has served the Academies in multiple roles, including serving as a vice-chair and chair of Section 1 of NAM, founding member of the Health and Technology Interest Group of NAM, and member of the Board of Mathematical Sciences and Analytics.

Dr. Vaibhav Unhelkar is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. He leads the Human-Centered AI and Robotics (HCAIR) group at Rice CS, which conducts research in the areas of human-robot interaction (HRI), interactive machine learning, and human-AI collaboration. Ongoing research in the group includes development of learning algorithms and interactive systems to model human behavior, train human-robot teams, and explain behavior of AI-enabled systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Autonomous Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 

Dr. Shannan K. Hamlin is an Associate Professor of Nursing and the Director for Center for Nursing Research, Education and Practice at Houston Methodist Hospital. She earned her PhD from UTHealth School of Nursing in 2010. Her research focuses on the adult critically ill patient population. She has serviced in the critical care areas at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist Hospital (HMH) as an advanced practice nurse and HMH as a nurse scholar. She serves on the Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Content Expert Panel for the American Nurses Credentialing Center. 

Qingxi Meng is a second-year Ph.D. student at Rice University, Houston, Texas USA. He develops perception-aware motion planning algorithms for applications in assitivie robots. 

Dr. Carlos Quintero-Peña is a Research Engineer in the Bookout Center at Houston Methodist. He received his PhD from Rice University in Computer Science, supervised by Lydia Kavraki and Anastasios Kyrillidis. He received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2019 for his doctoral studies. His research goal is to provide robots with the capabilities of autonomously deciding and acting in environments that may have noisy or incomplete information or where humans may be present. 

Pam Qian is a final-year Ph.D. candidate and Future Faculty Fellow at Rice University, Houston, Texas USA. She develops intelligent robotic tutoring systems for clinical nursing education. Her work appears at top venues such as TPAMI, HRI, AAMAS, and AAAI. Her work on interactively explaining robot behavior to human collaborators won best video award at AAMAS'22.