Debasmita Ghose
Computer Science Ph.D. Candidate
Yale University
I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Yale University, advised by Prof. Brian Scassellatti at the Yale Social Robotics Lab. I also collaborate with Prof. Marynel Vazquez from the Yale Interactive Machines Group. My research investigates how robots can adapt to people in shared tasks with limited human intervention.
Previously, I was a Master's student of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics under Prof. Rod Grupen.
I earned my BS in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India, where I focused on Embedded System Design and building robots.
I have enjoyed interning at the Technical University of Dresden (Germany), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and Siemens Corporate Technology (Munich, Germany).
In my free time, I enjoy traveling, photography, and cooking.
April 2026
April 2026
March 2026
February 2026
January 2026
🏆 A Replicable, Autonomous System for In-the-Wild Mental Health Applications with the Ommie Robot (led by Kayla Matheus) accepted to HRI 2026 (Demo/Interactivity track) and won the Best Demo Award!
December 2025
Open-Ended Goal Inference through Actions and Language for Human-Robot Collaboration accepted to HRI 2026 (Technical track).
November 2025
Serving as Program Chair for the HRI Pioneers Workshop, 2026 and Area Chair for HRI Late Breaking Reports.
November 2025
August 2025
Diverse, not Short: A Length-Controlled Data Selection Strategy for Improving Response Diversity of Language Models (led by Vijeta Deshpande) accepted to EMNLP 2025.
December 2024
🏆 Honored to have been selected as an HRI Pioneer! (one of 30 top early-career human-robot interaction researchers). Will present my work at the HRI Pioneers Workshop at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2025 (HRI 2025), in Melbourne, Australia.
July 2024
Integrating Multimodal Affective Signals for Stress Detection from Audio-Visual Data accepted to ICMI 2024.
May 2024
Planning with Critical Decision Points: Robots that Influence Humans to Infer Their Strategy accepted to
RO-MAN 2024.
December 2022
🏆 Interactive Policy Shaping for Human-Robot Collaboration with Transparent Matrix Overlays (led by Jake Brawer) accepted to HRI 2023 (Technical track) and won the Best Paper Award.
September 2022
May 2022
The Impact of an In-Home Co-Located Robotic Coach in Helping People Make Fewer Exercise Mistakes accepted to RO-MAN 2022.
September 2021
Active Learning for Improved Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Satellite Images accepted to
WACV 2022.
December 2020
Why we should build Robots that both Teach and Learn accepted to HRI 2021 (Theory and Methods track).
Fall 2019
Started working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Yale University.
May 2019
Graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst
April 2019
Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Images using Saliency Maps accepted to the Workshop on Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum at CVPR, 2019.
Summer 2018
🏆 Received the DAAD RISE Professional Scholarship - 2018 to pursue a research internship in robotics with Siemens CT, Munich, Germany
Fall 2017
Started Masters program in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Spring 2017
Pursuing a research internship in machine learning at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, through the NTU India Connect Program
October 2016
🏆 Received the Best Student Award for the Batch of 2013-2017, from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, India
Summer 2016
Pursuing a summer internship in aerial robotics at Techniche Universitat, Dresden, Germany