Faculty Profile: Prof. Marynel Vázquez — Yale CS
Faculty Profile: Prof. Marynel Vázquez — Yale CS
Position: Assistant Professor Institution: Yale University, Department of Computer Science Lab: Interactive Machines Group Report date: 2026-06-12
Research Focus
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in multi-party settings, graph-based social reasoning for robots, spatial behavior patterns, LLM applied to HRI contexts. Key idea: abstracting human-robot interactions as graphs to reason about individual, relationship, and group factors.
Academic Profile
- PhD: Carnegie Mellon University (Robotics, 2017)
- NSF CAREER Award (2022)
- Two Amazon Research Awards
Fit with Weijia Zhang
| Dimension | Assessment |
|---|---|
| LLM agents / agentic AI | ❌ Robots, not software agents |
| Post-training (SFT / RL) | ❌ Not her area |
| NLP / language models | ❌ LLMs used as a tool in HRI, not core research |
| VLM / GUI agents | ❌ Physical robots, not GUI |
| Multi-agent | ⚠️ Multi-party HRI, but physical robot context |
Verdict
Not relevant for Weijia. Social robotics / physical HRI focus with no meaningful overlap with NLP agents, SFT/RL post-training, or GUI/VLM agent research.