Henny Admoni

Scholar in residence September 2024 – August 2025

Henny Admoni is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab. Dr. Admoni studies how to develop intelligent robots to assist and collaborate with humans on complex tasks like meal preparation. She is most interested in how natural human communication, like where someone is looking, can reveal underlying human intentions and can be used to improve human-robot interactions.

Dr. Admoni has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant, an Okawa Research Grant, and the A. Nico Habermann Career Development Professorship at CMU. Dr. Admoni’s research has been further supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Office of Naval Research, the Paralyzed Veterans of America Foundation, Google, Meta, and Sony AI. She has been featured in media such as Wired, NPR’s Science Friday, Voice of America News, and WESA radio. Dr. Admoni holds a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University and an MA/BA degree in Computer Science from Wesleyan University.

One challenge that currently limits the adoption of assistive robots is the difficulty of ensuring that their learned behaviour will be safe. While machine learning allows robot designers to avoid having to pre-specify every possible scenario and action, it also means that the resulting robot behaviours may be unpredictable, particularly when the system encounters inputs that are out of the distribution of (i.e., not represented in) the training data. During her visit to KTH, Dr. Admoni will work with researchers in the Division of Perception, Robotics, and Learning to develop new methods for ensuring safety in human-robot interaction by drawing on techniques from AI, software engineering, and formal methods.

Contact: henny@cmu.edu