Sam Spaulding

I study human and machine learning in socially interactive tasks with humans and artificial agents

I currently work as a Machine Learning specialist at Apple, working with the Education Services team. The contents of this site reflect the research work I did during my graduate studies at MIT and are not connected to my work at Apple. I believe that AI and Robotics are transformative technologies and have a special passion for finding creative, ethical, and impactful applications for these fields (especially in Education and Art).

I received my Ph.D. from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, advised by Professor Cynthia Breazeal. My thesis was titled Lifelong Personalization For Social Robot Learning Companions: Interactive Student Modeling Across Tasks And Over Time. This research broadly focused on designing intelligent agents that can construct models of human partners from diverse sources of multimodal data, take actions based on these models, and reason about and refine those models in educational interactions.

From 2015-2017, I worked at Jibo Inc. on the Robot Skills and Character AI teams, helping to develop the world’s first social robot for the home. Before coming to MIT, I received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. While there, I worked with Professor Brian Scassellati in the Yale Social Robotics Lab and spent summers working at Amazon.com and at Disney Research with Senior Research Scientist Jonathan Yedidia.

Connect with me on Twitter @SpauldingSam