Andrea Lockerd Thomaz

Ph.D MAS – Alumni

Andrea received her PhD from MIT in Media Arts and Sciences in June 2006. Her doctoral dissertation is titled “Socially Guided Machine Learning.” Her research interests concern socially guided learning, augmenting statistical machine learning techniques with the ability to leverage from natural human instruction, with the ultimate goal of building robots that can learn new tasks and goals from people in everyday human environments. She will complete her post doctoral appointment at the Media lab in the summer of 2006, and begin her Assistant Professorship at Georgia Tech in the Computer Science Department in the Fall of 2007.
Andrea received her Bachelors of Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, where she studied Electrical and Computer Engineering. She received her Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 2002 where she developed machines that understand and react to the implicit intentions of the people interacting with them, and explored how this interaction influences the machine learning process. Some of her past research projects have investigated the information conveyed in implicit feedback channels such as mouse movements, laughter, eye movement, and email messages.