Upcoming Event: Center for Autonomy Seminar

Improved Symbiotic Human-Anatomy Teaming Models, Evaluation Methods, and Architectures

Rene Mai, Ph.D Candidate, Rensselaer Polytechnic

Abstract

How does human behavior change when interacting with autonomy at varying levels? My research examines symbiotic autonomous team modeling and evaluation from a dynamical systems perspective, as opposed to a social or data-driven one. Fundamentally, my research asks: “What models describe human-autonomy interaction, and how does human behavior change when we work with autonomous teammates?”

My work focuses on answering two key questions: (1) how does the joint team perform, and (2) how does the teaming affect both agents’ actions and performance? Preliminary results show that human drivers’ behavior changes dramatically when paired with an autonomous agent, but the net team still achieves its goal. I present the result of pilot tests examining how human behavior changes when paired with different symbiotic autonomous partners and how the resulting team performs, along with preliminary results from larger-scale testing. Future work includes examining physiological and psychological reactions from humans working with autonomous teammates and how these reactions correlate to resulting team performance.

Biography

Rene Mai is a fourth-year PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute advised by Professors Sandipan Mishra and Agung Julius. Fundamentally, the question that drives her research is how humans can build technology and devices to achieve peak performance. Rene integrates engineering and cognitive science perspectives in her approach to shared autonomy (also called symbiotic autonomy), and focuses on modeling human-autonomy interaction in complex systems such as robotics and transportation as a dynamical system, rather than from a social or data-driven perspective. 

Although her research focuses on the most efficient methods for teams to accomplish goals, her professional path has been less direct. Rene received her undergraduate degree in physics from Texas A&M University and then a juris doctor from the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Before deciding to leave law to start her PhD program, she worked as a patent litigation attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP.