Dr. Cindy Bethel is the Director of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems (STaRS) Lab. She is a Billie J. Ball Endowed Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Mississippi State University. She is currently serving on a temporary duty assignment as a Program Director for the National Science Foundation. She was also selected as a Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar in 2018 to advance her research in Australia.
Visit Dr. Bethel’s website here.
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Florida – Tampa, FL
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
NSF Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Graduate Fellowship
Dissertation: Robots without Faces: Non-Verbal Social Human-Robot Interaction
B.S., Computer Science
University of South Florida – Tampa, FL
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Honors Thesis: Mining for Implications in Medical Data
Professional
Postdoctoral Associate – NSF Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow
Yale University –New Haven, CT
Conducted a human-robot interaction study with typically developing children (ages 4-6), to determine how children will interact with an adult and a robot by performing the challenging cognitive task of keeping a secret shared by the investigator.
Assisted with the planning and study design associated with a human-robot interaction study using Pleo robots with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.
Organizing Committees and Program Committees
Primary Co-Chair for the Late Breaking Reports to the Organizing Committee for the 2013 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 2013. Tokyo, Japan.
Co-Chair for Late Breaking Results on the Organizing Committee for the 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 6–9, 2011. Lausanne, Switzerland.
Program Committee member for the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011), December 6 –9, 2011. Aachen, Germany.
Associate Editor serving on the International Program Committee for the 20th IEEE International Symposiumon Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2011), July 31 –August 3, 2011. Atlanta, GA, USA.
Program Committee member of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011), July 16 –22, 2011. Barcelona, Spain.
Technical Program Committee (TPC) member of the International Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Human Robot Interaction. The workshop will take place as part of The 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2011), May 23 -27, 2011.Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Read Dr. Bethel’s full CV here.
