Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025
Time: 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
Location: G01 Gates Hall
Speaker: Henny Admoni, Associate Professor, Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: Intelligent agents hold much promise for improving people’s lives, from driving assistance systems to home robots for older adults. Such assistive interactions inherently involve bidirectional communication, in which humans and agents both try to interpret and respond to their partner’s actions. As intelligent systems become more complex, their decision making becomes simultaneously more useful and harder to understand. In this talk, I will present several examples from my lab’s research on how people interpret the behavior of AI agents, and how agents can interpret the behavior of people. I’ll describe how we can use cognitive science concepts like theory of mind to improve the communication and explainability of AI systems, making them more useful for assistive and collaborative tasks with people.
Bio: Henny Admoni is an Associate Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab. Dr. Admoni studies how to develop intelligent robots that can assist and collaborate with humans on complex tasks like preparing a meal. She is most interested in how natural human communication, like where someone is looking, can reveal underlying human intentions and can be used to improve human-robot interactions.
Dr. Admoni has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant, an Okawa Research Grant, and the A. Nico Habermann Career Development Professorship at CMU. Dr. Admoni’s research has been further supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Office of Naval Research, the Paralyzed Veterans of America Foundation, Google, Meta, and Sony AI. She has been featured in media such as Wired, NPR’s Science Friday, Voice of America News, and WESA radio.
Previously, Dr. Admoni was a postdoctoral fellow at CMU with Siddhartha Srinivasa in the Personal Robotics Lab. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at Yale University with Professor Brian Scassellati in the Social Robotics Lab. Her PhD dissertation was about modeling the complex dynamics of nonverbal behavior for socially assistive human-robot interaction. Dr. Admoni also holds an MS in Computer Science from Yale University, and a BA/MA joint degree in Computer Science from Wesleyan University.
Website: https://hennyadmoni.com/bio/
