Karthik Mahadevan

Karthik Mahadevan

PhD student

University of Toronto

About

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where I am supervised by Dr. Tovi Grossman and Dr. Anthony Tang. I am passionate about how we can design systems and techniques to support natural and intuitive human-robot interaction. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, I received my MSc in Computer Science at the University of Calgary where I studied how we can design autonomous vehicle-pedestrian interaction. I also hold a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta.

Interests

  • Human-Robot Interaction
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2024

    University of Toronto

  • MSc in Computer Science, 2019

    University of Calgary

  • BSc in Electrical Engineering, 2016

    University of Alberta

Posts

Received Best Paper Award at HRI2024!

Our work, Generative Expressive Robot Behaviors using Large Language Models, received a Best Paper Award (Technical Track) at this year’s HRI!

Paper accepted to HRI 2024!

The work I conducted while working as a student researcher at Google Deepmind has been accepted to HRI 2024.

Started student researcher position in the robotics team at Google Deepmind.

I will be focusing on an HRI-related project.

3 papers accepted to CHI 2023!

3 papers accepted including one first author paper on querying spatial design recordings, a project I worked on during an internship at Autodesk Research. More details to follow.

Awarded Google PhD Fellowship in HCI

I am thrilled to announce that I have been named a Google PhD Fellowship in HCI to support my thesis work on human-robot collaboration.

Publications

(2024). Generative Expressive Robot Behaviors using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2024.

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(2023). Tesseract: Querying Spatial Design Recordings by Manipulating Worlds in Miniature. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023.

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(2023). Stargazer: An Interactive Camera Robot for Capturing How-To Videos Based on Subtle Instructor Cues. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023.

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(2023). Creepy Assistant: Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure the Perceived Creepiness of Voice Assistants. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023.

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(2022). Mimic: In-Situ Recording and Re-Use of Demonstrations to Support Robot Teleoperation. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2022.

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(2021). “Grip-that-there”: An Investigation of Explicit and Implicit Task Allocation Techniques for Human-Robot Collaboration. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2021.

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(2020). Autonomous Vehicle-Cyclist Interaction: Peril and Promise. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2020.

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(2019). AV-Pedestrian Interaction Design Using a Pedestrian Mixed Traffic Simulator. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 2019.

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(2018). Communicating Awareness and Intent in Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018.

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