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sydney [dot] thompson [at] yale [dot] edu
EDUCATION
Yale University - Expected May 2026
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science
(Expected completion: January 2026. Official degree conferral: May 2026)
Brigham Young University - 2018
B.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematics, cum laude
AWARDS & HONORS
2025 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) Outstanding Reviewer
2024 Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Best Demo Award, Honorable Mention
2023 Yale Computer Science Departmental Service Award
2021 Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention
PUBLICATIONS
2025 Thompson, S., Candon, K., & Vázquez, M. (2025). The Social Context of Human-Robot Interactions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.13982. To be published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.
2025 Gillet, S., Thompson, S., Leite, I., & Vázquez, M. (2025, March). Templates and Graph Neural Networks for Social Robots Interacting in Small Groups of Varying Sizes. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
2024 Thompson, S., Lew, A., Li, Y., Stanish, E., Huang, A., Phanse, R., & Vázquez, M. (2024, November). Predicting Human Intent to Interact with a Public Robot: The People Approaching Robots Database (PAR-D). In Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.
2024 Thompson, S., Narcomey, A., Lew, A., & Vázquez, M. (2024, March). Shutter: A Low-Cost and Flexible Social Robot Platform for In-the-Wild Deployments. In Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 94-96). Honorable Mention, Best Demo.
2021 Thompson, S., Gupta, A., Gupta, A., Chen, A., & Vázquez, M. (2021, November). Conversational Group Detection with Graph Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.
2021 Tsoi, N., Connolly, J., Adéníran, E., Hansen, A., Pineda, K. T., Adamson, T., Thompson, S., Ramnauth, R., Vázquez, M., & Scassellati, B. (2021, March). Conversational Group Detection with Graph Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Honorable Mention, Best Paper.
2020 Swofford, M., Peruzzi, J., Tsoi, N., Thompson, S., Martín-Martín, R., Savarese, S., & Vázquez, M. (2020). Improving Social Awareness Through DANTE: Deep Affinity Network for Clustering Conversational Interactants. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW1), 1-23..
Workshop Papers
2022 Lew, A., Thompson, S., Tsoi, N., & Vázquez, M. (2022, March). Shutter, the Robot Photographer: Leveraging Behavior Trees for Public, In-the-Wild Human-Robot Interactions. In Workshop on HRI Human-Robot Interaction in Public Spaces at 2022 ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interactions (HRI).
RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
2019 - Present Yale Interactive Machines Group
- Built robot photographer as a platform for public robot deployments used by 7 current Ph.D. students.
- Collected data from public robot deployments in 3 university locations to publish the People Approaching Robots Database.
- Collaborated with researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Cornell University, MIT, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Linköping University, Kyoto University, and Princeton University.
- Mentored 14 undergraduate students and 3 graduate students on projects ranging from robot greeting behavior selection strategies to developing remote robot monitoring tools to human emotion recognition.
June 2021-May 2022 Argo AI - Perception Research Intern
- Designed algorithm to rank importance of road agents in autonomous driving scenarios.
- Analyzed behavior of planning and perception models on Argoverse dataset to understand how different architecture influenced model attention to other agent positions and behavior.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Yale University - Teaching Fellow
2024 Human-Computer Interaction
2021 Intelligent Robotics
2020 Building Interactive Machines
RELEVANT SKILLS
Domain Expertise: Human-robot interaction, human social signal processing, robot behavior selection
Technical Expertise: Python, PyTorch, SQL, TensorFlow, data visualization, data cleaning, ROS
Algorithms & Modeling: Traditional inference models, Bayesian inference, clustering techniques, supervised learning, semi-supervised learning, graph neural networks, transformers, deep learning theory and modeling