Dan Szafir
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill • Former ATLAS faculty member
daniel.szafir@colorado.edu
303-735-7892

ATLS 201B

Beginning in August 2021, Szafir began a new position at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as an assistant professor of computer science. He served as an assistant professor of computer science with the ATLAS Institute 2015 – 2021.

Dan Szafir studies the design and use of robots and related novel technologies, including brain-computer interfaces and virtual reality, with the goal of improving usability and outcomes, such as learning and collaboration.  His research is focused on human-robot interaction (HRI) and human-computer interaction (HCI).  Dan received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. Prior to UW, he received degrees in computer science and history from Boston College.

 

Publications

  • Hooman Hedayati, Ryo Suzuki, Wyatt Rees, Daniel Leithinger, and Daniel Szafir . 2022. Designing Expandable-Structure Robots for Human-Robot Interaction. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. vol. 9. DOI=10.3389/frobt.2022.719639  (April 11, 2022).
     
  • Hooman Hedayati and Daniel Szafir. 2022. Predicting Positions of People in Human-Robot Conversational Groups. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '22). IEEE Press, 402–411.

  • Jamie Voros, Jamison McGinley, Steven McGuire, Michael Walker, Priyanka Karki, Nisar Ahmed, Daniel Szafir, and Torin Clark(C). (2020). Trust in an Autonomous Guidance System for a Planetary Rover Task. In the IEEE Aerospace Conference (AeroConf 2020), pp. 1–8. Big Sky, Montana. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO47225.2020.9172290

  • M. Whitlock, Daniel Szafir, & Kenny Gruchalla. 2020. HydrogenAR: Interactive Data-Driven Storytelling for Dispenser Reliability. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), DOI: 10.1109/ISMAR50242.2020.00101. (Virtual–Nov. 9-13, 2020) pdf. 

  • Hooman Hedayati, Ryo Suzuki, Daniel Leithinger, Daniel J. Szafir. 2020. PufferBot: Actuated Expandable Structures for Aerial Robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020). DOI: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341088. (Las Vegas, Nevada–Oct. 25-29, 2020) pdf.

  • Hooman Hedayati, Annika Muehlbradt, Daniel J. Szafir and Sean Andrist. 2020. REFORM: Recognizing F-formations for Social Robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020). DOI: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9340708. (Las Vegas, Nevada–Oct. 25-29, 2020). pdf

  • Hooman Hedayati, Daniel Szafir, and James Kennedy. 2020. Comparing F-Formations Between Humans and On-Screen Agents. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–9. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383015 (Honolulu, Hawaii (virtual) – April 25-30, 2020).
  • Ryo Suzuki, Hooman Hedayati, Clement Zheng, James Bohn, Daniel Szafir, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Mark D Gross, and Daniel Leithinger. 2020. RoomShift: Room-scale Dynamic Haptics for VR with Furniture-moving Swarm Robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 396, 11 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376523  (Honolulu, Hawaii – April 25-30, 2020).
  • Connor Brooks and Daniel Szafir. (2020). Visualization of Intended Assistance for Acceptance of Shared Control. In the Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020). Las Vegas, Nevada. doi: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9340964.
  • Brooks, Connor and Szafir, Daniel. 2019. Building Second-Order Mental Models for Human-Robot Interaction.  In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium Series (AI-HRI '19), ArXiv preprint arXiv:1909.06508. (Washington, DC – Nov. 7-9, 2019). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32117.73444.
  • Daniel Szafir. (2019). Mediating Human-Robot Interactions with Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications and Case Studies (HCII VAMR 2019), pp. 124–149. Orlando, FL. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-21565-1_9.
  • Darren Guinness, Annika Muehlbradt, Daniel Szafir, and Shaun K. Kane. 2019. RoboGraphics: Dynamic Tactile Graphics Powered by Mobile Robots. In Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3353804 (Pittsburgh, PA - Oct. 28, 2019). 
  • Steve McGuire, P. Michael Furlong, Terry Fong, Christoffer Heckman, Daniel Szafir,  Simon J. Julier, Nisar Ahmed. Everybody Needs Somebody Sometimes: Validation of Adaptive Recovery in Robotic Space Operations, in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1216-1223, April 2019. DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2019.2894381.
  • Hooman Hedayati, Daniel Szafir, and Sean Andrist. 2019. Recognizing F-Formations in the Open World. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/hri.2019.8673233 (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).
  • ​Connor Brooks and Dan Szafir. 2019. Balanced Information Gathering and Goal-Oriented Actions in Shared Autonomy.  In ACM/IEEE '19: The 14th Annual International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'19), (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019). DOI: 10.1109/HRI.2019.8673192.
  • Michael Walker, Hooman Hedayati and Daniel Szafir. 2019. Robot Teleoperation with Augmented Reality Virtual Surrogates. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19). (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).

  • T. Williams, D. Szafir, T. Chakraborti and E. Phillips. 2019. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interaction (VAM-HRI). In The 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19), pp. 671-672. DOI: 10.1109/HRI.2019.8673207  (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).

  • Williams, Tom, Szafir, Daniel, and Chakraborti, Tathagata. 2019. The Reality-Virtuality Interaction Cube: A Framework for Conceptualizing Mixed-Reality Interaction Design Elements for HRI. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19) (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).

  • M. E. Walker, D. Szafir and I. Rae, "The Influence of Size in Augmented Reality Telepresence Avatars," 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Osaka, Japan, 2019, pp. 538-546. doi: 10.1109/VR.2019.8798152 (Osaka, Japan – March 23-27, 2019).

  • Darren Guinness, Annika Muehlbradt, Daniel Szafir and Shaun K. Kane. 2018. The Haptic Video Player: Using Mobile Robots to Create Tangible Video Annotations. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 203-211. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3279778.3279805  (Tokyo, Japan — Nov. 25 - 28, 2018). 
  • Daniel Prendergast and Daniel Szafir. 2018. Improving Object Disambiguation from Natural Language using Empirical Models. In Proceedings of the 2018 on International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 477-485. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3242969.3243025  (Boulder, Colorado — Oct. 16 - 20, 2018).
  • Iuzzolino, Michael L., Michael E. Walker, and Daniel Szafir. "Virtual-to-Real-World Transfer Learning for Robots on Wilderness Trails." In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018). IEEE, 2018. (Madrid, Spain – Oct. 1-5, 2018).
  • Connor Brooks, Madhur Atreya, and Daniel Szafir. 2018. Proactive Robot Assistants for Freeform Collaborative Tasks Through Multimodal Recognition of Generic Subtasks. 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2018). DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/iros.2018.8594180 (Madrid, Spain – Oct. 1-5, 2018).

  • Hooman Hedayati, Akriti Kapur, Bradley Hayes and Daniel Szafir. 2018.  Robot Navigation for Space Station Environments, In Robotics: Science and Systems Conference at Carnegie Mellon University. (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania  – June 26-30, 2018).

  • S. McGuire, P. M. Furlong, C. Heckman, S. Julier, D. Szafir and N. Ahmed, Failure is Not an Option: Policy Learning for Adaptive Recovery in Space Operations,  in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 1639-1646, July 2018. DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2018.2801468.

  • Steve McGuire, Michael Walker, Jamison McGinley, Nisar Ahmed, Daniel Szafir and Torin Clark. 2018. TRAADRE: TRust in Autonomous ADvisors for Robotic Exploration at the Robotics: Science and Systems, In Robotics: Science and Systems, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 26 - 30, 2018).

  • Hooman Hedayti, Michael Walker, and Daniel Szafir. 2018.  Improving Collocated Teleoperation with Augmented Reality,  In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 78-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171251 [Runner-up for Best Paper in Design Category].
  • Michael Walker, Hooman Hedayti, Jennifer Lee, Daniel Szafir. 2018. Communicating Robot Motion Intent with Augmented Reality, In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 316-324. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171253  (Chicago, March 5-8, 2018) [Best Paper in Design Category].
  • Tom Williams, Daniel Szafir, Tathagata Chakraborti, and Heni Ben Amor. 2018. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interaction. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 403-404. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3173561 (Chicago, IL, USA — March 05 - 08, 2018).

Additional publications

 

Member of the IRON Lab  

In the news

Robot turns to person entering the conversational group, even though she is not wearing a detectable hat like the other three members of the group.
ATLAS researchers' algorithm helps robots detect everyone in social gatherings

April 6, 2022

Imagine a world where robots flawlessly detect everyone in a conversation group and also greet the newcomers. Described in a paper published in the March proceedings of the prestigious International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '22), Hooman Hedayati (PhD computer science '20) and Daniel Szafir, assistant professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill and former ATLAS faculty member, proposed a method to overcome situations when conversational group (F-formation) detection algorithms fail.

Front cover
RoomShift research: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine's cover story

Aug. 10, 2021

THING Lab researchers, led by recent PhD graduate, Ryo Suzuki, developed a swarm of shape-changing robots that move furniture around a room, opening up new haptic ideas for virtual reality.

Torin Hopkins beats on a drum next to an avatar also beating on a drum
AR Drum Circle research envisions enjoyable remote jamming experiences despite latency

Jan. 13, 2021

ATLAS researchers and Ericsson Research project collaborators are exploring ways in which remote drumming experiences can be made more enjoyable despite the latency, including drumming with avatars.

https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2021/student-design-competition/
Assistant Professor Dan Szafir to co-chair the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HR2021)

Dec. 2, 2020

HRI 2021, which will be held virtually March 8-11, is the 16th annual conference for basic and applied human-robot interaction research. Researchers from across the world present their best work to HRI to exchange ideas about the theory, technology, data and science furthering the state-of-the-art in human-robot interaction. The student design competition is open to everyone; the deadline is December 10.

More