Elaine Schaertl Short
Elaine Schaertl Short is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the Tufts University Department of Computer Science. She completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Maja Matarić in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from USC in 2012 and her B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University in 2010. She is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, USC Provost’s Fellowship, and a Google Anita Borg Scholarship. At USC, she was recognized for excellence in research, teaching, and service: she was awarded the Viterbi School of Engineering Merit Award and the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) Merit Award for Current Doctoral Students, as well as the Best Research Assistant Award, Best Teaching Assistant Award, and Service Award from the Department of Computer Science. At Yale she was the recipient of the Saybrook College Mary Casner Prize. Her research focuses on building algorithms that enable robust assistive human-robot interaction in schools, homes, crowds, and other natural environments.
Assistant Professor Elaine Schaertl Short's work lies at the intersection of assistive technology and social robotics (including socially assistive robotics), developing robots that can support people, especially children, older adults, and people with disabilities, in achieving their goals. A key focus of this work is understanding the user as embedded in a social and environmental context, developing algorithms that can learn from, interact with, and provide assistance to such users in real-world environments such as schools, hospitals, and public spaces.
- 2018: Microsoft Research AI Breakthroughs Workshop
- 2017: George Beckey Service Award, USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems
- 2017: Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
- 2010: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship