Lixiao (Sean) Zhu

About

I am a PhD candidate at McGill University, where I am researching the influence of collaborative robots on human behavior in human-robot interaction (HRI). I have a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Colorado School of Mines and have a strong background in programming and technology. My research involves developing a quantitative model to measure the change in human movements during collaborative tasks with robots, using the phenomenon of entrainment as a basis. My work encompasses a range of areas including HRI, human perception of robots, and robot ethics. In addition to my studies and work, I have a passion for building PCs and enjoy staying up-to-date with the latest advancements in technology. Through my studies and interests, I hope to contribute to the advancement of robotics and deepen our understanding of the interaction between humans and robots. 

Projects

Quantifying Robot Influence on Humans: The research aims to develop a quantitative model of a collaborative robot’s influence on human behaviours in dyadic HRI. The entrainment effect is leveraged. Entrainment is an adaptive human behaviour where people voluntarily or involuntarily synchronize their movements to the environment. With a full understanding of how entrainment effects impact the robot's influence on human behaviours and human perception of a robot in short-term human-robot interaction, a mathematical model will be trained to quantify the robot's influence on human motions. In other words, the model will be trained based on the collected human motions to quantitive measure the change in participants’ movement for a collaborative task between humans and robots. The work is the first work to allow robotics researchers to dynamically measure robot's influence on human behaviours based on the entrainment effect. The project involves the areas of human-robot interaction, human perception of robots, robot planning, machine learning, and robot ethics.

Publications

• Lixiao Zhu, and Tom Williams. "Effects of Proactive Explanations by Robots on Human-Robot Trust." In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR). 2020.

• Lixiao Zhu. "Effects of Proactive Explanations by Autonomous Systems on Human-Robot Trust." MS thesis. Colorado School of Mines, 2020.

• Lixiao Zhu, Xuejin Wen, Qi Han, Alex Fryer, Neil Suttora, and Andrew J. Petruska. "Performance Evaluation of Wi-Fi for Underground Robots." In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshops on UAV Swarm Networking for Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, in conjunction with the 16th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous). 2019.

• Will Culpepper, Thomas A. Bennett, Lixiao Zhu, Rafael Sousa Silva, Ryan Blake Jackson, and Tom Williams. "IPOWER: Incremental, Probabilistic, Open-World Reference Resolution." In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 44, no. 44. 2022.

• Poulomi Pal, Lixiao Zhu, Andrea Golden-Lasher, Akshay Swaminathan, and Tom Williams. "Givenness Hierarchy Theoretic Cognitive Status Filtering." In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci). 2020.

• Nicholas Woodward, Teresa Nguyen, Lixiao Zhu, Carter Fowler, Taewoo Kim, Stacia Near, Stephen Thoemmes, and Tom Williams. "Exploring Interaction Design Considerations for Trustworthy Language-Capable Robotic Wheelchairs in Virtual Reality.” In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for HRI (VAM-HRI). 2020.