Frank Broz

I'm a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, co-advised by Reid Simmons and Illah Nourbakhsh. My research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, planning, and human-robot interaction. More specifically, I'm interested in building models of human behavior that robots can use to reason about the intentions of the people they interact with. My research approaches planning for socially situated tasks (riding elevators with people, navigating in populated areas) from a decision-theoretic planning perspective, using existing techniques that deal with the partial observability and dynamic nature of these problems.

Publications (also under previous name, A. Bruce):

Refereed Conference Papers:

• F. Broz, I. Nourbakhsh, R. Simmons. "Planning for Human-Robot Interaction Using Time-State Aggregated POMDPs", To appear in Proceedings of AAAI 2008. (PDF)
• R. Gockley, A. Bruce, J. Forlizzi, M. Michalowski, A. Mundell, S. Rosenthal, B. Sellner, R. Simmons, K. Snipes, A. C. Schultz, and J. Wang. "Designing Robots for Long-Term Social Interaction", In Proceedings of IROS 2005.
• A. Bruce,G. Gordon. "Better Motion Prediction for People-Tracking", In Proceedings of ICRA 2004. (PDF)
• A. Bruce, I. Nourbakhsh, R. Simmons. "The Role of Expressiveness and Attention in Human-Robot Interaction", In Proceedings of ICRA 2002. (PDF)
• A. Bruce, J. Knight, S. Listopad, B. Magerko, I. Nourbakhsh. "Robot Improv: Using Drama to Create Believable Agents", In Proceedings of ICRA 2000.(PDF)

Workshop and Symposium Papers:

• F. Broz, "POMDP Planning for Socially Situated Tasks in HRI", NEWHRI Workshop, ICRA 2008. (PDF)
• R. Simmons, A. Bruce, D. Goldberg, A. Goode, M. Montemerlo, N. Roy, B. Sellner, C. Urmson, A. C. Schultz, W. Adams, M. D. Bugajska, M. MacMahon, J. Mink, D. Perzanowski, S. Rosenthal, S. Thomas, I. Horswill, R. Zubek, D. Kortenkamp, B. Wolfe, T. Milam, B. A. Maxwell. "GRACE and GEORGE: Autonomous Robots for the AAAI Robot Challenge", In AAAI 2003 Mobile Robot Competition Workshop, AAAI Press, Technical Report WS-03-01, pp. 52-, August 2003.
• A. Bruce,I. Nourbakhsh, R. Simmons. "The Role of Expressiveness and Attention in Human-Robot Interaction", In Emotional and Intelligent II: The tangled knot of social cognition AAAI 2001 Fall Symposium, AAAI Press, Technical Report FS-01-02, pp.17-21, November 2001.
  (A later version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of ICRA 2002)

Workshop Posters:

• A. Bruce "Decision Theoretic Approaches to Human-Robot Social Interaction", Planning for the Real World: The promises and challenges of dealing with uncertainty Workshop. NIPS 2003.

Past Projects:

• The Social Robots Project is the project that I'm a part of here at CMU. We're creating a robot that exhibits socially appropriate behavior and is entertaining to interact with.