Dr. Andrew ‘Zoz’ Brooks

Ph.D EECS – Alumni

Andrew received his PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in February 2007. His dissertation is titled “Coordinating Human-Robot Communication.” His dissertation work contributes in the area of embodied communication, focusing on issues of establishing common ground, spatial communication in a shared physical environment, non-verbal communication through body language and proxemics, and the ability to shape communication interactively. This work was applied to a diverse set of sophisticated humanoid testbeds including NASA JSC’s Robonaut, Sony’s QRIO, and our group’s Leonardo platform. He is currently a co-host in a new television series, called “Prototype This” on the Discovery Channel, to educate the general public and foster excitement and interest in science and engineering.
Andrew received his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, majoring in Organic Chemistry and Computer Science and received First Class Honors in Computer Science and a Graduate Diploma in Education. He received his Master’s degree at the Robotic Systems Laboratory of the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra. Past research projects include developing vision systems that recover three-dimensional facial information from stereo photographs, designing and implementing real-time visual behaviors for high-performance stereo camera platforms, and exploring virtual environment technology for navigation and the acquisition of spatial knowledge in large-scale spaces. Other research interests in HRI include designing active vision systems for human-robot interaction, and extending this work to multi-modal interactions involving imitation-based learning tasks.