Developing capable robotic systems & understandable robot interactions

Meet Zhao Han
Zhao Han is a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, joining Dr. Tom Williams’ interactive robotics MIRRORLab.
His research lies broadly in human-robot interaction (HRI), robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and augmented reality (AR). More specifically, he focuses on designing and studying novel robotic systems and interactions, for embodied robots being more capable in human environments and more understandable while interacting with humans.
Dr. Han is an award-winning researcher, leading teams to win multiple robot competitions: first place in the Panasonic Prototype 3D LiDAR Challenge, second place in the FetchIt Mobile Manipulation Challenge at ICRA 2019, and a finalist in the Analog Devices (ADI) Real-Time Sensor Fusion Challenge. He has recently won the best late-breaking report third prize at HRI 2022.
Service is important and beneficial to academic life. He co-organizes the AI-HRI symposium, is actively involved in HRI standardization and more. At Mines, Dr. Zhao Han founded the Mines Asian Community Alliance and is a founding officer of Mines’ office of postdoctoral affairs. He believes in STEM outreach to broaden participation and involve under-represented, under-resourced communities.
Dr. Han received his Ph.D. (2021) in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the Human-Robot Interaction Lab, directed by AAAI Fellow Dr. Holly Yanco. Previously, he received his M.S. (advised by Dr. Carson Leung in the Database and Data Mining Lab) and B.S. degrees in Computer Science at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
His Research

Human-Robot Interaction
(HRI)

Robotics

Artificial Intelligence
(AI)

Augmented Reality
(AR)
News
from Zhao Han
Jun 22, 2022
I am a General Co-Chair of the AAAI AI-HRI symposium! Submit by 7/31 and join us in November.
Jun 11, 2022
Our paper, Evaluating Referring Form Selection Models in Partially-Known Environments, was just accepted to the ACL International Conference on Natural Language Generation!
May 27, 2022
The 2022 edition of the AI-HRI symposium was just accepted to the AAAI Fall Symposium Series! I was selected as General Co-Chair this year. Hopefully we will meet in person!
May 10, 2022
Our workshop on Affective Human-Robot Interaction (AHRI) was accepted to 10th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2022)!
Apr 4, 2022 I was elected as a Division Councilor of the Mathematics and Computer Sciences Division in The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR)!
Mar 21, 2022
We just uploaded the slides for our AAAI-FSS paper on Causal Robot Communication Inspired by Observational Learning Insights!
Recent Publications

