Jean Oh is an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and head of the roBot Intelligence Group (BIG). Jean's research focuses on building technologies that remind us of "what makes us human," promoting human values such as safety, creativity, and compassion across diverse domains including self-driving vehicles, safe aviation, and arts.
Jean's work on social robot navigation and creative robotics has won several best paper awards at major robotics conferences including ICRA and IROS, and has been featured in media worldwide including New York Times and the Telegraph. Jean has been leading a series of interdisciplinary events on AI/Robotics and Arts at Humanoids'25, ICRA'25, NeurIPS'24, NeurIPS'23, RSS'21, SIGGRAPH'21 and CVPR'21. Jean is currently Co-Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Cognitive Robotics.
Jean received a PhD from CMU, MS from Columbia University, and BS from Yonsei University.
Summer 2019. Xinjie Yao, a senior student from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, worked with Ji Zhang and me on social navigation. Below is the video showing her demo at the Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) final presentation session. Xinjie's work will also be presented at International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) at the Late Breaking Results poster session in Macau in October, 2019.
Summer 2018. Brandon Trabucco from UC Berkeley, co-mentored by Ralph Hollis and myself, presented his work on detailed image captioning at the Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) poster session. Brandon is definitely a student with many talents; he also performed "My Way" at the program's final ceremony. (photo: with another summer student, Kai-Chi Huang from UT Austin, and an RI PhD student, Roberto Shu.)
Summer 2017. A Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) student, Matthew Wilson from University of Utah, co-mentored by Ralph Hollis and myself, worked on the "Go, Look, and Tell" project where he developed a speech interface to command a Shmoo (ballbot) to navigate autonomously, recognize semantic objects, and report what it has seen back to the user.
May 2018.A. Vemula, K. Muelling, J. Oh. Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds. In Proc. of IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Brisbane, Australia, 2018. (Best Paper Award in Cognitive Robotics) [ArXiv].
May 2015. A. Boularias, F. Duvallet, J. Oh, and A. Stentz. Learning to ground spatial relations for outdoor robot navigation. In Proc. of IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Seattle, WA, 2015. (Best Paper Award in Cognitive Robotics). [pdf].
