Debasmita Ghose

Starting a new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago and launching my research group - the PEople Aligned Robots Lab (PEARL). 

Rethinking the Implications of Human Feedback for Preference Learning in Human-Robot Collaboration (led by Qiping Zhang) accepted to CoRL 2026. 

Robots Influencing Humans to Reveal their Goals during Collaboration and Competition accepted to Autonomous Robots (AURO). 

Gave an invited talk at the University of Melbourne hosted by Wafa Johal!

🏆 Honored to have been selected as an RSS Pioneer! (one of 30 top early-career robotics researchers). Will present my work at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference (RSS 2026) in Sydney, Australia.

Serving as Publications Co-Chair for HRI 2027. 

Exploring Robot-Led Activities between People Living with Dementia and Family Care Partners (led by Fern Limprayoon) accepted to Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Defended my thesis titled Robots Adapting to People without Becoming a Nuisance. 

🏆 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!

Open-Ended Goal Inference through Actions and Language for Human-Robot Collaboration accepted to HRI 2026 (Technical track). 

Serving as Program Chair for the HRI Pioneers Workshop, 2026 and Area Chair for HRI Late Breaking Reports. 

I've Changed My Mind: Robots Adapting to Changing Human Goals during Collaboration accepted to RA-L. 

Diverse, not Short: A Length-Controlled Data Selection Strategy for Improving Response Diversity of Language Models (led by Vijeta Deshpande) accepted to EMNLP 2025.

🏆 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. 

Integrating Multimodal Affective Signals for Stress Detection from Audio-Visual Data accepted to ICMI 2024. 

Planning with Critical Decision Points: Robots that Influence Humans to Infer Their Strategy accepted to 

RO-MAN 2024. 

🏆 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. 

Tailoring Visual Object Representations to Human Requirements: A Case Study with a Recycling Robot accepted to CoRL 2022.

The Impact of an In-Home Co-Located Robotic Coach in Helping People Make Fewer Exercise Mistakes accepted to RO-MAN 2022.

Active Learning for Improved Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Satellite Images accepted to 

WACV 2022.

Why we should build Robots that both Teach and Learn accepted to HRI 2021 (Theory and Methods track).

Started working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Yale University.

Graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Images using Saliency Maps accepted to the Workshop on Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum at CVPR, 2019.

🏆 Received the DAAD RISE Professional Scholarship - 2018 to pursue a research internship in robotics with Siemens CT, Munich, Germany

Started Masters program in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Pursuing a research internship in machine learning at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, through the NTU India Connect Program 

🏆 Received the Best Student Award for the Batch of 2013-2017, from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, India

Pursuing a summer internship in aerial robotics at Techniche Universitat, Dresden, Germany