Pragathi Praveena

🚀 I am on the job market for tenure-track faculty positions in CS (or related) starting in Fall 2026! Please reach out if you know any suitable openings. Here is a 2-minute overview of my research vision!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robotics Institute, CMU where I contribute to the NSF AI-CARING Institute. I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UW-Madison, where I was part of the People and Robots Lab. I have been recognized as an MIT EECS Rising Star, as well as an HRI Pioneer and RSS Pioneer.

My research focuses on designing intelligent, interactive systems that enhance collaboration in group settings. In teams, families, and classrooms, individuals bring different goals, abilities, and constraints to their shared endeavors. These differences can fuel collaboration but may also create miscommunication, inefficiency, and conflict. Through human-centered design, I develop robotic and AI systems that mediate these differences to improve collective outcomes while respecting human diversity.

My teaching and mentoring is guided by the belief that CS education should prepare students to integrate technical expertise with the analytical, creative, and collaborative skills needed to succeed in a rapidly evolving landscape shaped by automation and AI. I put this into practice by designing learning experiences that emphasize human-centered design, interactive engagement, and experiential learning.

Prior to graduate school, I worked for two years as a Junior Research Scientist at the Xerox Research Center India, where I developed algorithms to monitor a person’s breathing using webcams (see video). I hold a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Dissertation | Towards Effective Robotic Groupware

CSCW | Periscope: A Robotic Camera System to Support Remote Physical Collaboration

CHI LBW | Exploring the Use of Collaborative Robots in Cinematography

DIS | REX: Designing User-centered Repair and Explanations to Address Robot Failures

UIST | NarraGuide: an LLM-based Narrative Mobile Robot for Remote Place Exploration

HRI | Understanding Control Frames in Multi-Camera Robot Telemanipulation

HRI 🏅 | Supporting Perception of Weight through Motion-induced Sensory Conflicts in Robot Teleoperation

HRI | Characterization of Input Methods for Human-to-robot Demonstrations

ICRA | User-Guided Offline Synthesis of Robot Arm Motion from 6-DoF Paths

ICRA | RangedIK: An Optimization-Based Robot Motion Generation Method for Ranged-Goal Tasks