Sonia Chernova

Sonia Chernova was the director of the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab in the Robotics Engineering Program at WPI. Chernova's research interests span interactive robot learning, human-robot interaction, and human computation, with a central focus on building systems that are able to learn from human instruction. She is particularly interested in active learning and the development of algorithms that enable learning agents to regulate their autonomy. Chernova also interested in exploring crowdsourcing, both as a means of data collection and to enable rapid prototyping of interactive robotic systems. Sonia received my Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 working with Manuela Veloso. Before joining WPI, she spent one year working with Cynthia Breazeal as a postdoc at the MIT Media Lab.