HFEWOMAN Webinar: A Discussion with Dr. Beth Phillips, "What does it mean for robots to be humanlike?"

Dr. Heather C. Lum is an assistant professor in human systems engineering within the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida in applied experimental and human factors psychology. Her primary research interests focus on perceptions of technology, specifically the ways in which technology is impacting the way we interact with each other as humans. Other areas of interest include the use of psychophysiological measures such as eye tracking and vocal analyses to better determine and study the critical applied cognitive and experimental topics of interest such as spatial cognition, human-human, human-animal and human-robot team interactions. She has also turned her attention to the use of games and virtual/mixed environments for training and educational purposes. She is the director of the Virtual Environments and Cognitive Training Research (VECToR) lab. 

Dr. Elizabeth “Beth” Phillips is an assistant professor in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Group in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University. She is also the director of the Applied Psychology and Autonomous Systems (ALPHAs) Laboratory. Her work focuses on human interactions with robots, autonomous systems, and related technologies like augmented and virtual reality. She studies how we can make these systems better teammates, partners, and companions for people in the near future, including studying what it means for robots to be human-like. She is also the co-creator of the Anthropomorphic RoBOT (ABOT) Database, a publicly available resource to enable systematic, generalizable, and reproducible research on the effects of robots’ human-like appearance.