Fangyun (Olivia) Zhao

Credentials: Ph.D. Student, Psychology

LUCID Research Project: Social Robotics

The Wisconsin Human-Computer Interaction Lab (http://hci.cs.wisc.edu/)

Research Interests: Emotions, Social Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics

Research Advisors: Dr. Paula Niedenthal and Dr. Bilge Mutlu

My current research project focuses on cultural differences on Social synchronization during face-to-face interaction. Previous research has looked at a relatively new cultural dimension- historical heterogeneity – on nonverbal expressivity. Each presentday nation has an objectivelyderived heterogeneity score, which refers to the number of source countries that contributed substantially to the nation’s presentday population over the last 500 years. My project aims to finding out the relationship between historical heterogeneity and nonverbal behaviors. Importantly, I am interested in exploring cutting-edge techniques on developing stimulus and measuring human behaviors.

I’m also working on projects that focus on telepresence robots – a mobile video-conferencing system that enables remote collaboration easier. We are interested in how field-of-view would improve remote collaboration, and how the underlying mechanism of gaze behavior could be incorporated into human-robot interaction.