Event Details - CS Department Lecture - Henny Admoni, Carnegie Mellon University

Henny Admoni

Associate Professor of Robotics

Carnegie Mellon University

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Palamountain Hall – Davis Auditorium

Talk 4:30 pm

Reception 4:15 pm

Bidirectional Understanding In Human-AI Interaction

Intelligent agents hold much promise for improving people’s lives, from driving assistance systems to home robots for older adults. Such assistive interactions inherently involve bidirectional communication, in which humans and agents both try to interpret and respond to their partner’s actions. As intelligent systems become more complex, their decision making becomes simultaneously more useful and harder to understand. In this talk, I will present several examples from my lab’s research on how people interpret the behavior of AI agents, and how agents can interpret the behavior of people. I’ll describe how we can use cognitive science concepts like theory of mind to improve the communication and explainability of AI systems, making them more useful for assistive and collaborative tasks with people.