college faculty and staff directory >
college department directory >
Atlanta (August 25, 2009) — Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor in interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35. Thomaz, who joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2007, focuses her research on social interactions between robots and humans.
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere research universities. Ranked
among U.S. News & World Report's top 10 public universities, Georgia Tech educates more
than 16,000 students every year through its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal
Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech maintains a diverse campus and is among the nation's top producers
of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both
undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the
Georgia Tech Research Institute. During the 2003-2004 academic year, Georgia Tech reached $341.9
million in new research award funding.
Technology Review Names Tech Professor Top Innovator
Andrea Thomaz was recognized by Technology Review as one of the top innovators under 35.
“It’s quite hard to enumerate, much less engineer ahead of time, all the tasks and skills people will need robots to do,” said Thomaz. “We’re working on developing robots that can learn new skills from everyday people so that the robots can adapt their behavior to the task at hand.”
It’s called Socially Guided Machine Learning, and Thomaz is working on bridging the gap between state-of-the-art learning systems and the kind of teaching an everyday person is able to give the robot.
For example, her robots - Junior and Simon - give visual cues, such as gestures and facial expression, to indicate whether they understand what a human is telling them. Thomaz also develops machine learning methods to help robots learn physical tasks more quickly, particularly from teachers who are not necessarily programmers.
Thomaz was selected from more than 300 nominees by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, MIT’s magazine on science and technology. She will be featured along with the other 34 finalists in the magazine’s September/October issue, and will be recognized at MIT’s Emerging Technologies Conference in September.