Andrea Thomaz

Andrea L. Thomaz is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She directs the Socially Intelligent Machines lab, which is focused on building socially collaborative personal robots. Her research aims to computationally model mechanisms of human social learning in order to build social robots and other machines that are intuitive for end-users to teach. She earned a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the MIT Media Lab in 2002 and 2006. Dr. Thomaz is published in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, on NOVA Science Now, she was named one of MIT Technology Review’s TR 35 in 2009, on Popular Science Magazine’s Brilliant 10 list in 2012, and gave a TEDx talk “The next frontier in robotics: social, collaborative robots” in 2015.