People

Holly Yanco

Holly Yanco is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center. She was named Distinguished University Professor at the university in 2015. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, multi-touch computing, interface design, robot autonomy, fostering trust of autonomous systems, evaluation methods for human-robot interaction, and the use of robots in K-12 education to broaden participation in computer science. Yanco's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, including a CAREER Award, the Army Research Office, DARPA, NIST, and Google. Yanco was the General Chair of the 2012 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and is now the co-chair of the conference's steering committee. She served on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 2006-2009 and was the Symposium Chair for AAAI from 2002-2005. She is a senior member of AAAI. Yanco has a PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College.

Current Staff Members

Current Graduate Students 

Current Undergraduate Students

Staff members with drones during a field test event in Fall 2021

Members of the HRI Lab with collaborators from BYU and CMU during a visit to Amazon Robotics in Summer 2019

HRI Lab Alumni

Post-doctoral Associates

PhD

MS

Undergraduate Students (years worked in lab noted)