Faculty Directory

Biography

Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017.

Tom’s research focuses on enabling and understanding natural language based human-robot interaction that is sensitive to environmental, cognitive, social, and moral context. His work is funded by grants from NSF, ONR, and ARL, as well as by Early Career awards from NSF, NASA, and AFOSR.

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science: Cognitive Science, Tufts University. Dissertation: Situated Natural Language Interaction in Uncertain and Open Worlds Committee: Matthias Scheutz (Chair), Jan P. de Ruiter, Anselm Blumer, Candace Sidner
• M.S., Computer Science, Tufts University.
• B.A., Computer Science, Hamilton College.

Research

“My research broadly focuses on artificial intelligence for human-robot interaction, especially problems involving natural language understanding and generation in uncertain and unknown environments. My work is strongly informed by work in cognitive science, especially theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology.”

• Human-Robot Interaction
• Natural Language Understanding and Generation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive Science
• Robot Ethics
• Augmented Reality

 

Labs & Research Centers

MIRRORLab

Publications

Below are some select publications circa 2020. For a more up to date list, visit mirrorlab.mines.edu or click Publications above.

 

• Williams, T., Zhu, Q., Wen, R., & de Visser, E. (2020). The Confucian Matador: Three Defenses Against the Mechanical Bull. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). ACM. [alt.HRI track]
• Jackson, R.B., Williams, T., & Smith, N.  (2020). Exploring the Role of Gender in Perceptions of Robotic Noncompliance. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). ACM.
• Jackson, R. B., & Williams, T. (2019). Language-capable robots may inadvertently weaken human moral norms. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 401-410). IEEE. [alt.HRI track]
• Williams, T., & Scheutz, M. (2019). Reference in robotics: A givenness hierarchy theoretic approach. The Oxford handbook of reference.
• Scheutz, M., Williams, T., Krause, E., Oosterveld, B., Sarathy, V., & Frasca, T. (2019). An overview of the distributed integrated cognition affect and reflection DIARC architecture. In Cognitive Architectures (pp. 165-193). Springer, Cham.
• Williams, T., Tran, N., Rands, J., & Dantam, N. T. (2018). Augmented, mixed, and virtual reality enabling of robot deixis. In International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (pp. 257-275). Springer, Cham.
• Williams, T., Thames, D., Novakoff, J., & Scheutz, M. (2018). ” Thank You for Sharing that Interesting Fact!” Effects of Capability and Context on Indirect Speech Act Use in Task-Based Human-Robot Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 298-306). Best Paper Nominee
• Williams, T., & Scheutz, M. (2017). The state-of-the-art in autonomous wheelchairs controlled through natural language: A survey. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 96, 171-183.
• Williams, T., Briggs, G., Oosterveld, B., & Scheutz, M. (2015). Going beyond literal command-based instructions: Extending robotic natural language interaction capabilities. In Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• “Thank You for Sharing that Interesting Fact!”: Effects of Capability and Context on Indirect Speech Act Use in Task-Based Human-Robot Dialogue
• Resolution of Referential Ambiguity in Human-Robot Dialogue Using Dempster-Shafer Theoretic Pragmatics

Awards & Honors

• New and Future AI Educator Award, EAAI, 2017.
• New and Future AI Educator Award, Invited second year participant, EAAI, 2018.
• Teaching Fellowship, Tufts Graduate Institute for Teaching, 2015.
• Doctoral Consortia, YRRSDS 2014, HRI 2015, AAAI 2016.

Additional Information

Personal web page

@williamstome