New Associate Professor Sees Research Becoming More Human-Centered

Jesse Thomason has seen his research evolve over the last decade.

It began with a focus on helping computer systems incorporate human language into their perception of the world. Could a robot tell humans that a heavy object is straining its arm? Does it know that a container makes a sound when it is picked up or dropped?

Now, Thomason’s research has become more human-centered, which is one reason he feels at home as he joins the faculty at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor.

Thomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.

He will move his Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observation, and Robots (GLAMOR) lab to Tech. The lab explores methods for connecting natural language processing to robotics.