While our research is not strictly meant to advance robotics proper, it is nonetheless often robotics that stands to benefit.
Rista Baral’s excellent work on recognizing and generating robot behaviors (Cozmo and Misty II) is available in the IROS 2025 Proceedings.
Enoch Levandovsky‘s awesome work on getting a small LM to generate child-level utterances (tested on Cozmo) published at SigDial (ACL).
Cynthia Matuszek (and other colleagues) reporting guidelines for LLMs published in Transactions of Human-Robot Interaction.
Incremental Dialogue Management in the context of Human-Robot Interaction with Pierre Lison and David Schlangen published in the Journal of Dialogue and Discourse.
Retico
Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, this year has been the year of Retico. We hosted 6 interns:
these interns dramatically expanded the modules and example systems that make use of Retico.
Anna Manaseryan is a graduate student who helped the interns and has been heavily involved in the development and community building for Retico.
Anna published a demo on the “robot-ready Spoken Dialogue System” which uses Retico, published at SigDial (ACL).
Anna also helped host a tutorial at the IROS 2026 conference in Hangzhou, China on how to use Retico.
Finally, Dr. Kennington also presented a tutorial at the HAI 2026 in Yokohama, Japan.
We’re not done with Retico! If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to reach out.