Rex Gonzalez

Past Member

Rex Gonzalez

Junior Undergraduate Researcher III

rexallengonzalez@usf.edu

5/12/2025→1/10/2026


Hello! My name is Rex Gonzalez, and I am currently a junior at the University of South Florida studying Computer Science with a minor in math. My technical skills include Python, C/C++, and HTML/CSS. With these skills I was able to create a USF AI Chatbot for Academic Planning by developing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI chatbot program that Gemma 3 by way of Ollama which used a database of JSON-based course flowcharts and live class data to deliver personalized schedule recommendations based on academic year, major, and semester. I also have some experience in computer vision and machine learning developing for the ASME Student Design Competition which a computer vision based ball bearing sorting system as a potential alternative to mechanical design where I helped train a YOLO model using Ultralytics and integrated OpenCV for real-time detection using our own custom dataset.

— 5/13/2025


Publications

Xiangfei Kong, Rex Gonzalez, Nicolas Echeverria, Sofia Cobo Navas, Thuc Anh Nguyen, Divyamshu Shrestha, Sebastian Ramirez-Vallejo, Deekshita Senthil Kumar, Andrew Texeira, Thao Nguyen, Deep Akbari, Hong Wang, Hongdao Meng, Zhao Han

Bloom Preview: A Low-Cost LLM-Powered Social Robot

2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Interactivity

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2026

News

HRI 2026 LBR and Interactivity Acceptance

One LBR and one Interactivity paper were accepted to HRI 2026!

Congrats Hong & Bao on “Evaluating Dynamic Surface Compensation for Robots with Projected AR” accepted (LBR) & Bloom team (Thuc Anh, Div, Sebastian, Hong et al.) on “Bloom Preview: A Low-Cost LLM-Powered Social Robot” (interactivity)!

2025 Fall Lab Lunch

The end of ¼ century marks the start of Spring, which we gather and celebrate at another lab lunch!

UR2PhD REU Funding

Five RARE Lab undergraduate researchers received the competitive Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) funding by the Computing Research Association (CRA)! Congrats, Aditi, Aarav, Sofia, Rex, and Thuc Ahn!

2025 OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

RARE Lab’s Bloom robot with an older-adults application, our preliminary work, was presented at the OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium! Good job, Andrew, Rex, and Sofia!

2025 Summer CRA UR2PhD

Congrats to 11 undergraduate researchers on completion of the UR2PhD research course: Aarav, Paramveer, Thao, Aditi, Abrar, Sofia, Anjali, Rex, Miguel, and Thuc Anh!

Also, congrats, Amanual and Xiangfei, on finishing the Graduate Student Mentorship Training!

Summer 2025 Lab Lunch

June is here, and Summer starts. Welcome, new and old lab members!