Human behavior has been studied from many perspectives and at many scales. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience each use different methodologies, scope, and evaluation criteria to understand aspects of human behavior. Computer science, and in particular robotics, offers a complementary perspective on the study of human behavior. Our research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Our work uses computational modeling and socially interactive robots in different methodological roles to explore questions about social development that are difficult or impossible to assail using methods of other disciplines.

Lab meetings occur every Monday at 4:00pm. If you are interested in joining our lab, please contact Brian Scassellati for location information and consider attending a meeting.

Dec 2009	Congratulations to Elaine Short, Justin Hart, and Michelle Vu! Their paper, "No Fair!! An Interaction with a Cheating Robot" was accepted for presentation at the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2010), to be held in March in Osaka, Japan.
Dec 2009	Congratulations to Chris Crick, who finished his thesis, accepted a postdoctoral position at Brown, and moved to Providence, all within a matter of weeks! (The rest of us are still not entirely sure how that happened.)
Nov 2009	Our lab hosted the first "Robotics Social", a monthly gathering of the three Yale robotics labs.
Sept 2009	Congratulations to Chris Crick, who defended his dissertation on "Inferring Social Roles and Intention from Motion and Interaction".
Sept 2009	Welcome to Cindy Bethel, Henny Admoni, Bradley Hayes, and Daniel Winograd-Cort! Cindy, a 2009 NSF Computing Innovation Fellow, is joining the group as a post-doctoral associate. Henny, Brad, and Dan are joining the group as first-year graduate students in the Computer Science Department.
Aug 2009	Congratulations to Chris Crick! Chris won the Cognitive Science Society's 2009 Higher-Level Cognition Modeling Prize for his paper titled Intention-based Robot Control in Social Games.