Mason Smith

Mason Smith is a student of Systems Engineering at the school of Manufacturing and Systems Networks (MSN) at the polytechnic campus. He is also a member of Robotics and Intelligent SystEms Laboratory (RISE) Lab and part of the human-robot interaction team. He received his BSE in Engineering (Robotics) and BS in Human Systems Engineering in 2020. He continued his education by completing a MS in Engineering in 2021 and is currently working towards his Ph.D in Systems Engineering at which time he received an NSF National Research Traineeship fellowship and received funding from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).

Mason's research interests include the study of improving automated agents understanding of human cognition and perception to enable them to be better partners. Specifically, he has focused on training reinforcement learning agents to interact with humans that are biased when faced with risky decisions as this is critical to consider during operation in the real world. Also, Mason looks into how these models can be leveraged to modulate appropriate trust within these teams.