News

Spring concludes with a good lab gathering. Italy style! (Sorry that not all could come!)

RARE Lab’s multimodal storytelling social robot preliminary work was accepted to the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics. Congrats to Tammy, Chi, Felix, and Suyog!

RARE Lab’s preliminary work on explaining transformer-based visual-motor policies was accepted to the ICRA 2025 workshop on Human-Centered Robot Learning in the Era of Big Data and Large Models. Congrats, Ammanuel Ergogo!

RARE Lab’s projectives work on mitigating robot abuse was presented at the USF Graduate Student Research Symposium. Good job and great practice, Ridhima!

Dr. Zhao Han will be on the international program committee at RO-MAN 2025 as an associate editor!

RARE Lab’s four works were presented at the renowned HRI conference in Australia!

RARE Lab’s fog machine controller work was accepted to the 8th International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed-Reality for Human-Robot Interactions (VAM-HRI) at HRI 2025! Congrats to Adrian Lozada and Michael Klein!

RARE Lab’s robot vision capability work leveraging familiar experiences was accepted to the “Explainability for Human-Robot Collaboration: Real-World Concerns” Workshop (X-HRI) at HRI 2025! Congrats to Hong Wang and Maria Julia Vidal!

RARE Lab’s projectives work on mitigating robot abuse was accepted to the DEI-HRI workshop at HRI 2025! Ridhima Phatak will be on the DEI Student Pioneers panel, presenting the work followed by a panel discussion on research methodologies and applying DEI dimensions!

RARE Lab participated in the USF ACM AI Convention outreach event! Minh Ha and Maria showcased our research on indicating a robot’s vision capability with a Pepper robot and AR headset.

Dr. Zhao Han will chair the paper session 2B: Teleoperation and Shared Autonomy at HRI 2025. See you in Melbourne from 13:00 – 14:35 on Tuesday, March 4!

Congrats to 12 RARE Lab undergraduate students accepted to the CRA Undergraduate Research to PhD (“UR2PhD”) program: Tammy, Jonathan, Chi, Vlad, Maria, Tony, Khoa, Suyog, Bao, Minh Ha, Thom, and Khang! Also congrats to two graduate students Hong and Ridhima accepted to Graduate Student Mentorship Training.

Dr. Zhao Han will be a publication chair at HRI 2026 to help the community grow!

RARE Lab has a LinkedIn page now. Follow us there! Kudos to Minh Ha Pham for creating and maintaining it!

RARE Lab’s fog screen work was accepted to the HRI conference (25% acceptance rate)! Congrats to Adrian, Uthman, Villa, and Hong!

We just had our mid-fall lab lunch. German style! (Sorry that Maria, Felix, and Jonathan were unable to join!)

RARE Lab participated in the DevFest Tampa Bay outreach event! Hong and Maria showcased our research on indicating a robot’s vision capability with a Pepper robot and AR headset.

We just had our start-of-summer brunch or lunch!

Congrats to Adrian Lozada and Villa Keth for selection to the CRA Undergraduate Research to PhD (“UR2PhD”) program to learn the hidden, fulfilling research pathways!

Dr. Zhao Han has received the Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research Award – Faculty, in part thanks to the nomination from Tammy Do and Liam Ha!

Congrats to Adrian Lozada for acceptance to the selective CRA-WP Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU)! Adrian will be mentored by Dr. Zhao Han this summer in the RARE lab.

Congrats to Tammy Do and Liam Ha for presenting their work on robots for mental health at the 2024 OneUSF Undergraduate Research Conference! If you missed it, watch a pre-recorded video here.

RARE Lab went to the top VR/AR conference—IEEE VR ’24! Hong Wang presented a poster submission on clarifying a robot’s physical vision capability.

After just six months, RARE Lab started strong at HRI 2024! Uthman Tijani, Hong Wang, and Xiangfei Kong presented the lab’s works [1, 2, 3]. Dr. Zhao Han gave a keynote.

RARE Lab participated Innovation Fest outreach event! Hong Wang showcased our research on indicating a robot’s vision capability with a Pepper robot.

Congrats to Xiangfei Kong for acceptance of her first paper to the WYSD workshop at HRI 2024! It is time to hone methodological skills!

Two papers were accepted to the VAM-HRI 2024 workshop! Congrats to Hong Wang, Tammy Do, and Uthman Tijani! Dr. Zhao Han will also give a keynote to the workshop!

Congrats to Hong Wang for being selected (50/200=25%) as a student volunteer at IEEE VR ’24!

Hong Wang’s first first-author submission (poster) with Tammy Do’s help was just accepted!

Congrats to Xiangfei Kong & Hong Wang for acceptance to the student volunteer program at HRI ’24. It is a great opportunity to connect with their peers and a fun way to participate in the top conference in HRI!

We just unboxed a powerful Fetch robot and learned how to be safe with it. Again, stay tuned to our work!

A Misty II robot has arrived to the RARE lab. Stay tuned to our work!

Congrats to Hong Wang and Uthman Tijani for acceptance to 2024 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Wokshops for Women and IDEALS (respectively)! They will build mentoring relationships and peer networks there to benefit their graduate career and beyond, as well as balance the power inequality in CS.

We just had our end-of-semester lab lunch at Bahama Breeze. What a breeze in Florida!

RARE Lab’s first paper was accepted to HRI 2024: “Towards Reproducible Language-Based HRI Experiments: Open-Sourcing a Generalized Experiment Project!”