Leena Mathur I am a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS) in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). My research focuses on foundations of multimodal AI, social intelligence in AI, and embodied intelligence in real-world social interaction contexts, with applications to enhance human well-being. At CMU, I am fortunate to be advised by Louis-Philippe Morency and Yonatan Bisk. My PhD work is generously supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, I interned at Robust.AI, an early-stage startup, where I worked on perception and human-robot interaction challenges for collaborative mobile robots. I earned an MS from CMU SCS/LTI and a BS in Computer Science, BA in Cognitive Science, and BA in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. I am fortunate to have worked with wonderful research mentors — Maja Matarić at USC's Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center, Khalil Iskarous at USC's Linguistics Department, Ralph Adolphs at Caltech, Michael Shindler at UC Irvine, and Rémi Lebret at EPFL. I am grateful for my undergraduate experience learning from USC's AI community and my 4 years leading and growing the engineering school's student AI organization CAIS++, mentored by Bistra Dilkina from USC's Center for AI in Society. I now serve on the CAIS++ alumni advisory board. Google Scholar  /  Github  /  LinkedIn  /  Twitter Email: lmathur_at_andrew_dot_cmu_dot_edu Research     Teaching     Outreach & Service     Honors     Robots & Miscellaneous

• [Nov 2024]  📝 Position paper on core technical challenges, open questions, and opportunities to advance social intelligence in AI agents (Social-AI) will appear at EMNLP 2024! Our position is anchored in social intelligence concepts and prior decades of Social-AI research across computing communities.
• [Sep 2024]  Co-organizing the 3rd edition of the Artificial Social Intelligence Workshop at ECCV 2024 on 9/29! We have a great lineup of keynote speakers and discussions planned in Milan 🇮🇹
• [Aug 2024]  Co-organizing the Teaching NLP Workshop at ACL 2024! We will discuss the future of NLP education at ACL in Bangkok 🇹🇭
• [May 2024]   Starting a research internship at Robust.AI! I will be working on robot perception and human-robot interaction challenges for collaborative mobile robots working alongside and for humans!
• [Jan 2024]  📝 Sotopia was accepted as a spotlight paper to ICLR 2024! SOTOPIA is a framework and environment for studying social intelligence in language agents.
• [Oct 2023]  📝 Paper accepted at EMNLP! We propose Difference-Masking, a continued pretraining technique for self-supervised learning!
• [Jul 2023]  📝 Paper accepted at ICMI! We synthesize how affective phenomena have been studied in multimodal interaction, affective computing, and NLP, highlighting understudied areas and future directions. I will present this in October at ICMI in Paris! 🇫🇷

• Research team member in a large-scale CS education study, to inform algorithms curriculum development in universities (2021-2022); Paper published in the Journal of Computer Science Education (CSE Vol. 32, No. 3, 2022)
• USC Resident Assistant (RA) in residential colleges with ~1000 first-year students, co-taught RA curriculum (2019-2022)
• Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for USC's Department of Computer Science -- CS 170, Discrete Mathematics (2019)
• USC Joint Education Project Instructor; designed and taught an 8-week computer science class to third-grade students at 32nd Street School, Los Angeles (2019)

Reviewing/Program Committee

• COLM 2024
• IROS 2024
• ACII 2023 (workshop track chair), ACII 2024
• ACM ICMI 2023, ICMI 2024
• International Journal of Social Robotics, 2022

• Organizer: ECCV 2024 Workshop on Artificial Social Intelligence
• Organizer: ACL 2024 Workshop on TeachingNLP
• Organizer: ICCV 2023 Social-IQ Challenge
• Organizer: ICCV 2023 Workshop on Artificial Social Intelligence
• Organizer: ACII 2023 Workshop on Social and Affective Intelligence
• Organizer No Joke: We're Talking About LLMs, a seminar and hackathon on large language models (2023)

• Leadership Team running the CMU Paths to AI Research Mentoring Program, 200+ undergraduates each semester (2023-present)
• Editorial Board for CMU's Machine Learning Blog, a cross-department initiative (2023-present)
• CMU's PhD and MS Application Info-Session, Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science (2022, 2023)
• CMU School of Computer Science OurCS Workshop for visiting undergraduate researchers (2022)
• Worked as a USC Resident Assistant (RA) in residential colleges with ~1000 first-year students, co-taught RA curriculum (2019-2022)
• Served as a judge at AthenaHacks, an annual hackathon with 400+ participants (2019, 2021, 2022)
• Mentored undergraduates in USC Women in Engineering Mentorship Program (2019)
• Mentored undergraduates in the student branch of USC's Center for AI in Society, CAIS++ and USC Interaction Lab (2018-2022)
• Designed and taught AI and robotics workshops for 500+ USC students and Los Angeles K-12 students; initiated these programs through the Viterbi K-12 STEM Center, CAIS++, and USC Interaction Lab (2018-2022)

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2022-2027)
• CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award [CRA post, USC News] (2022)
• USC Viterbi School of Engineering Award for Outstanding Research, recognizes one graduating student for research (2022)
• USC Albert Dorman Grand Challenge Scholar Award, recognizes one graduating student for research, academics, leadership, and service (2022)
• USC university-wide awards: Discovery Scholar, Global Scholar Prize, Renaissance Scholar, Order of Troy (2022)
• USC Department of Computer Science Award for Outstanding Research (2022)
• American Society for Engineering Education PSW Undergraduate Student Award (2022)
• Astronaut Scholarship (2021)
• Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (2021)
• USC Robotics Lab George Bekey Service Award, for contributions and mentorship in the USC robotics community (2021)
• Phi Beta Kappa (2021)
• Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship [USC News] (2020)
• Best Paper Award Nominee at ACM ICMI (2020)
• USC Provost's Undergraduate Research Fellowship (7 times, 2019-2021)
• École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Summer Computer Science Research Fellowship (2019)

I have worked with the following robots across a variety of embodiments:

Carter
from Robust.AI

QTrobot
from LuxAI

Nao
from Aldebaran

Pepper
from Softbank

Kiwi
from USC

Some resources regarding academia and research that I have found helpful:

• Paul Liang's repo which includes many of the highlighted items on this list (and more)
• MIT CSAIL's Missing Semester of Your CS Education for tools/techniques not covered in traditional CS coursework
• Eugene Vinitsky's post on expectation setting during a PhD
• Pranav Rajpurkar's materials on AI research experiences
• Mor Harchol-Balter's description of the CS PhD application process
• Andrej Karpathy's survival guide for CS PhD students
• Tim Dettmers' guide to CS PhD admissions (with a focus on AI)
• Another golden guide from Tim Dettmers on how to choose a CS PhD program
• Alex Lang's resources on applying for the NSF GRFP
• Mallory Ladd's resources on applying for the NSF GRFP
• Andrej Karpathy's perspective on navigating undergraduate courses

Other:
I learned piano for ~13 years growing up and continue to enjoy classical music. My favorite composers are Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff.