Curriculum Vitae

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Research Interests

My work focuses on machines that learn new tasks and goals from ordinary people in everyday human environments. This research works from the assumption that machines meant to learn from people can better take advantage of the ways in which people naturally approach teaching. My research works to understand and computationally model specific mechanisms of human social learning in order to build machines that participate in social learning interactions. This work has interconnected goals from Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer/Robot Interaction: improving the performance of a machine's learning behavior through attention to human interaction and improving the experience of the human teacher by designing interactive learning algorithms based on how people teach. This work spans the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Human-Computer/Robot Interaction, and Cognitive Science.

Education

• MIT - Ph.D. Candidate, Media Arts & Sciences, June 2006
• MIT - M.S., Media Arts & Sciences, September 2002
• University of Texas at Austin - B.S.E.E., May 1999

Honors and Awards

• Best Student Poster, HRI-2006
• Warner Bros. Research Fellowship, 2005
• Horowitz Research Fellowship, 2004
• Eircom Research Fellowship, 2001

Dissertation Research (Sept 2003-June 2006)

Socially Guided Machine Learning

Abstract:
While the topic of human input to machine learning algorithms has been explored to some extent, prior works have not gone far enough to understand what people will try to communicate when teaching a machine and how algorithms and learning systems can be modified to better accommodate a human partner. Interface techniques have been based on intuition and assumptions rather than grounded in human behavior, and often techniques are not evaluated with everyday people.

Using a computer game, an experiment with human subjects provides several insights about how people approach the task of teaching a machine. In particular, people want to direct and guide an agent's learning process, they quickly use the behavior of the agent to infer a mental model of the learning process, and they utilize positive and negative feedback in asymmetric ways.

Using a robotic platform, Leonardo, and 200 people in follow-up studies of modified versions of the computer game, four Socially Guided Machine Learning research themes are developed. 1) The use of human guidance in a machine learning exploration can be successfully incorporated to improve learning performance. 2) Novel learning approaches demonstrate aspects of goal-oriented learning. 3) The transparency of the machine learner can have significant effects on the nature of the instruction received from the human teacher, which in turn positively impacts the learning process. 4) Using asymmetric interpretations of positive and negative feedback from a human partner can result in a more efficient and robust learning experience.

Thesis Committee:
• Advisor: Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, MIT
• Andrew Barto, Professor of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• Rosalind Picard, Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, MIT

Research Experience

MIT Postdoctoral Associate (June. 2006 - present)
The goals of my one-year post-doc with Prof. Cynthia Breazeal have been to publish and present my thesis research at four conferences; to prepare two journal publications of my thesis research; to conduct follow-up research with both the Sophie and Leonardo platforms; and to gain classroom and teaching experience. Additionally, this post-doc involves presenting work to sponsors, assisting in grant proposal preparations, and consulting with lab sponsors including senior management of Fortune 500 companies.

MIT Research Assistant to Professor Cynthia Breazeal (Sept. 2003 - June 2006)
In the Robotic Life Group, we develop robotic systems that can naturally work and learn with human partners. Additionally, this RA has involved presenting work, assisting in grant proposal preparations, and consulting with lab sponsors.

Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA, Internship at Microsoft Research (June 2003 - Sept. 2003)
Interned with the Communities Technologies Group (now Social Computing), led by Marc Smith. Expanded the group's Usenet technologies for mining social statistics to the realm of email. Developed data mining tools, incorporated statistics into the Outlook email client, and ran a usability study to evaluate the accuracy of the mined statistics.

MIT Research Assistant to Professor Ted Selker (Sept. 2000 - June 2003)
Assisted in the ongoing development of the Context Aware Computing Group laboratory, incorporating Artificial Intelligence and interactive computer systems.

IBM, Austin, TX, USA, Scientist/Engineer RS/6000 Division (June 1999 - July 2000)
Worked with a group of 12 engineers charged with simulating (in C++) the memory subsystems of a RISC symmetric multiprocessor, for the purpose of circuit design verification. I wrote a cache preloader to save millions of cycles needed to achieve specific cache states in processor simulation. I interned with this same group for several semesters during my undergraduate studies.

Teaching Experience

• Coordinator of the Robots Reading Group (Fall 2006): Organized a research reading group around the topic of Human-Robot Interaction. Choose weekly paper topics and lead group discussion.
• MAS 622J - Guest Lecture on Reinforcement Learning (Fall 2006): Taught an introductory lecture on Reinforcement Learning to a class of 30-40 MIT graduate students. Prepared an online activity as homework, interactively training an RL agent, to give the students hands-on experience with some of the algorithms presented in class.
• Teaching Assistant, Pattern Recognition (Fall 2006): One of two teaching assistants for the Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning course taught by Prof. Roz Picard, approximately 30 graduate students. In this course the TA responsibilities included: preparing 6-10 problem sets and their solutions; grading problem sets; teaching a one-hour recitation every other week; and holding open office hours 1-2 times a week.
• Teaching Assistant for a Context-Aware Computing Reading Group (Fall 2002): Prepared a reading list and lead group discussions for a class of graduate and undergraduate students.
• Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) mentor (Sept. 2000 - present): I have supervised undergraduate research projects for six MIT undergraduates for one or more semesters. Supervision has included teaching programming skills (Java, C), guiding architecture design, formulating research plans, and supervising the execution of experiments with human subjects.

Publications

http://web.media.mit.edu/~alockerd/pubs.html

Conference Presentations

• RO-MAN, 2006: "Reinforcement Learning with Human Teachers".
• IVA, 2006: "Teachable Characters".
• AAAI, 2006: "Reinforcement Learning with Human Teachers".
• ICDL, 2006: "Transparency and Socially Guided Machine Learning".
• NIPS Workshop, 2005: "Socially Guided Machine Learning: Designing an Algorithm to Learn from Real-Time Human Interaction".
• Android Science Workshop, 2005: "Robot Science Meets Social Science: An Embodied Computational Model of Social Referencing".
• AAAI Workshop, 2005: "Real-Time Interactive Reinforcement Learning for Robots".
• AAAI Workshop, 2004: "Robot Learning Through Collaborative Dialog".
• AAMAS, 2004: "Teaching and Working with Robots as Collaboration".
• Interact, 2003: "DriftCatcher: The Implicit Social Context of Email".
• AAAI Fall Symposium, 2002: "Personal Data for Personal Use".
• Sunbelt International Conference on Social Networks, 2002: "DriftCatcher: Enhancing Social Networks Trough Email".
• CHI 2001: "Cheese: Tracking Mouse Movements Websites a Tool for User Modeling".

Invited Talks

• Artificial Intelligence Research Group, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Feb. 2006.
• Computer Science Seminar, Brown University, Providence, R.I., Feb. 2006.
• Media Lab Digital Life and Things That Think Sponsor Events, Cambridge, MA, Nov. 2005.
• MIT TechLink Mentor Connection Forum, Cambridge, MA, April 2004.
• Media Lab Information:Organized Sponsor Event, Cambridge, MA, Oct. 2003.
• Media Lab Digital Life Sponsor Event, Cambridge, MA, Oct. 2001.
• Media Lab Europe Internal Research Symposium, Dublin, Ireland, Aug. 2001.
• Media Lab Europe Context-Aware Computing Workshop, Dublin, Ireland, June 2001.

Professional Activities

• Organizing Committee member, HRI 2007 Young Researchers Workshop in conjunction with the HRI 2007 conference, Washington, D.C., March 2007.
• Reviewer: Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2007)
• Reviewer: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2006)
• Reviewer: International Joint Conference on Nerual Networks (IJCNN 2006)
• Reviewer: Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005)
• Reviewer: International Conference on Developmental Learning (ICDL 2005)

University Service

• MediaWomen founding member, 2003-present: Obtained MIT funding for two consecutive years to support monthly gatherings of Media Lab women students, faculty and staff.
• Student Committee Volunteer, 2004-2005, Assisted in building community and fostering communication between students and faculty of the MIT Media Lab, through special event planning, student surveys, and faculty meetings.
• Student Representative to the Faculty Search Committee, 2002-2003.

References

Please download the .pdf for reference contact information.