UW CSE (Allen School)

Winter Robotics Colloquium: Marynel Vázquez (Yale University)

In this Winter Robotics Colloquium, Marynel Vázquez from Yale University argues that the next wave of generalist robots must combine physical dexterity with social intelligence. Using the household robot Rosie as a touchstone, she illustrates how today’s manipulation‑focused systems are evolving toward agents that can interpret language, gestures, and contextual cues in real‑world settings such as homes, factories, and elder‑care facilities. Vázquez proposes a concrete definition of "social context" as the set of attributes of agents, environments, and their inter‑relationships that shape interaction outcomes. She highlights the massive combinatorial space of these factors, noting that unlike autonomous vehicles, human‑robot interaction lacks a clear rulebook, making long‑tail, rare events a central challenge. Large language models, she suggests, offer a pathway to endow robots with the nuanced understanding required for these open‑ended scenarios. The talk’s most vivid evidence comes from a series of lab experiments on robot abuse and social influence. When a robot displayed vulnerability—either by expressing emotion or briefly shutting down—participants were more likely to intervene against a mistreating confederate. In a collaborative task with multiple robots, the group’s collective sadness prompted even stronger human intervention, demonstrating that robots can leverage group dynamics to shape behavior. Vázquez concludes that designing truly generalist robots demands interdisciplinary work spanning robotics, psychology, and AI. As robots become embedded in everyday social spaces, engineers must embed contextual awareness and ethical reasoning, lest they deploy systems that fail in the very human environments they are meant to serve.