Maya Cakmak – a robotics researcher specializing in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Programming by Demonstration (PbD) – will be joining the UW CSE faculty.
Maya completed her Ph.D. in Robotics at Georgia Tech in 2012. Since then she has been a post-doctoral research fellow at Willow Garage, Inc., manufacturer of personal robots and robot software. A main goal of her research is to enable non-experts to program personal robots by providing demonstrations of what they want. Maya’s work investigates challenges faced by potential users of such programmable robots and develops interaction mechanisms, learning algorithms, and interfaces to make programming by demonstration more efficient and effective.
Welcome Maya!