Photo of Alan R. Wagner

Alan R. Wagner

Associate Professor

Affiliation(s):

  • Aerospace Engineering

428 ECoRE Building

azw78@psu.edu

814-865-3138

Personal or Departmental Website

Research Areas:

Autonomous Flight and UAVs

Interest Areas:

Autonomous System Control and Planning, Human-Robot Interaction and Teaming, Social Robotics, Machine Ethics, RoboEthics, Humanitarian and Search and Rescue robotics, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Systems

 
 

 

Education

  • BA, Psychology, Northwestern University, 1997
  • MS, Computer Science, Boston University, 2001
  • Ph D, Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009

Publications

Journal Articles

  • Eduardo Mendieta and Alan R Wagner, 2024, "The Aristotelian Robot: Towards a Moral Phenomenology of Artificial Social Agents", Philosophy Today, 68, (2), pp. 327-340
  • Ali Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2023, "Cbcl-pr: A cognitively inspired model for class-incremental learning in robotics", IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 15, (4), pp. 2004-2013
  • Seyed Hossein Zargar, Robert M M. Leicht, Alan R Wagner and Nathan C. Brown, 2023, "Integrating early assessment of robotic constructability into design optimization of a standalone classroom", Automation in Construction, 157, pp. 105175
  • Vidullan *Surendran and Alan R Wagner, 2023, "That was not what I was aiming at! Differentiating human intent and outcome in a physically dynamic throwing task", Autonomous Robots, 47, (2), pp. 249-265
  • Himavath *Jois and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "What Happens When Robots Punish? Evaluating Human Task Performance during Robot-Initiated Punishment", Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 10, (4), pp. 1–18
  • Alan Richard Wagner, 2021, "Robot Guided Evacuation as a Paradigm for Human Robot Interaction Research", Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Special Issue on Rising Stars in Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 14
  • David Feil-Seifer, Kerstin S Haring, Silvia Rossi, Alan R Wagner and Thomas Williams, 2020, "Where to Next? The Impact of COVID-19 on Human-Robot Interaction Research", ACM Transactions in Human-Robot Interaction, 10, (1), pp. 7
  • Jason Borenstein, Harshal P Mahajan, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna Howard, 2020, "Trust and Pediatric Exoskeletons: A Comparative Study of Clinician and Parental Perspectives", IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, 1, (2), pp. 83-88
  • David Atkinson, Douglas Burig, Marc Canellas and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Autonomous Systems & Domestic Security", Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, 7, (3), pp. 150-194
  • Alan R Wagner, Jason Borenstein and Ayanna Howard, 2018, "Overtrust in the robotic age", Communications of the ACM, 61, (9), pp. 22-24
  • Jason Borenstein, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna Howard, 2018, "Overtrust of Pediatric Healthcare Robots: A Preliminary Survey of Parent Perspectives", IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine: Special Issue on Socio-ethical Approaches to Robotics Development, 25, (1), pp. 46-54
  • Alan R Wagner, Paul Robinette and Ayanna Howard, 2018, "Modeling the Human-Robot Trust Phenomenon: A Conceptual Framework based on Risk", ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 8, (4), pp. 26:1-26:24
  • Paul ^Robinette, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna M Howard, 2017, "The Effect of Robot Performance on Human-Robot Trust in Time-Critical Situations", Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, 47, (4), pp. 425 - 436
  • Joe Lyons, Mathew Clark, Alan R Wagner and M Schuelke, 2016, "Certifiable Trust in Autonomous Systems: Making the Intractable Tangible", Artificial Intelligence Magazine, 38, (3), pp. 37-49
  • Alan R Wagner, 2015, "Robots That Stereotype: Creating and Using Categories of People for Human-Robot Interaction", Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, 4, (2), pp. 97–124
  • Alan R Wagner and Paul ^Robinette, 2015, "Towards robots that trust: Human subject validation of the situational conditions for trust", Interaction studies, 16, (1), pp. 89–117
  • Ronald Craig Arkin, Patrick Ulam and Alan R Wagner, 2012, "Moral decision making in autonomous systems: Enforcement, moral emotions, dignity, trust, and deception", Proceedings of the IEEE, 100, (3), pp. 571–589
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald C Arkin, 2011, "Acting deceptively: Providing robots with the capacity for deception", International Journal of Social Robotics, 3, (1), pp. 5–26
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald C Arkin, 2008, "Analyzing social situations for human–robot interaction", Interaction Studies, 9, (2), pp. 277–300
  • Tongjia Zheng, Zhenyuan Yuan, Mollik *Nayyar, Alan R Wagner, Minghui Zhu and Hai Lin, , "Multi-Robot-Guided Crowd Evacuation: Two-Scale Modeling and Control Based on Mean-Field Hydrodynamic Models", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology

Conference Proceedings

  • Vidullan *Surendran and Alan R Wagner, 2023, "Show Me What to Pick: Pointing Versus Spatial Gestures for Conveying Intent", Busan, Republic of Korea, pp. 77-84
  • Christopher McClurg, Ali Ayub, Harsh Tyagi, Sarah Rajtmajer and Alan R Wagner, 2023, "Active Class Selection for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning", Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 232, pp. 811-827
  • Zhenyuan Yuan, Tongjia Zheng, Mollik Nayyar, Alan R Wagner, Hai Lin and Minghui Zhu, 2023, "Multi-robot-assisted human crowd control for emergency evacuation: A stabilization approach", San Diego, CA, USA, pp. 4051-4056
  • Lamar Cooley-Russ, Kalyani Lakkanige, Sumit Kumar, Raj Ratn Pranesh, Sarah Rajtmajer and Alan R Wagner, 2023, "A Testbed for Cognitively Plausibly Bartering Agents", pp. 398-400
  • Jason Borenstein, Arthur Melo Cruz, Alan R Wagner, Alan R Wagner and Ronald Arkin, 2023, "From HHI to HRI: Which Facets of Ethical Decision-Making Should Inform a Robot?", 1, pp. 3
  • Bianca Gonzalez, Junayed Muhammed Zahed, Alan R Wagner and Jack Langelaan, 2023, "Scalable Collision Avoidance in High-Density Airspaces", Vertical Flight Society, West Palm Beach, United States, pp. 8
  • Tyler Brett Stephens and Alan R Wagner, 2023, "Demonstration and Evaluation of an Automated Construction System for Assembling a Landing Pad and Blast Wall", In AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum, National Harbor, MD, pp. 18
  • Brett Sheeran, Alan R Wagner, Colin Holbrook and Daniel Holman, 2023, "Robot Guided Emergency Evacuation from a Simulated Space Station", In AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Harbor, MD, pp. 13
  • Tongjia Zheng, Zhenyuan Yuan, Mollik Nayyar, Alan R Wagner, Minghui Zhu and Hai Lin, 2022, "Multi-Robot-Assisted Human Crowd Evacuation using Navigation Velocity Fields", pp. 2061-2066
  • Maryam Zare, Alan R Wagner and Rebecca Passonneau, 2022, "A POMDP dialogue policy with 3-way grounding and adaptive sensing for learning through communication", Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, Association for Computational Linguistics, Abu Dhabi, pp. 6767-6780
  • Christopher McClurg, Alan R Wagner and Sarah Rajtmajer, 2022, "Construal Level Theory as a Means for Anticipating Human-Robot Interactions", Proceedings of the Thinking Fast and Slow and Other Cognitive Theories in AI a AAAI 2022 Fall Symposium, Arlington, VA, pp. 15
  • Vidullan Surendran, Arthur Melo-Cruz, Alan R Wagner, Jason Borenstein, Ronald C Arkin and Shengkang Chen, 2022, "Informing a Robot Ethics Architecture through Folk and Expert Morality", CLAWAR Association Ltd, Seoul, South Korea, pp. 12
  • Shengkang Chen, Ronald C Arkin, Jason Borenstein, Alan R Wagner and Arthur Melo-Cruz, 2022, "Case-based Robotics Architecture with Multiple Underlying Ethical Frameworks", CLAWAR Association Ltd, Seoul, South Korea, pp. 6
  • Austin Dennis McClymonds, Somayeh Asadi, Robert Leicht and Alan R Wagner, 2022, "Information Exchange for Supporting BIM to Robotic Construction", Construction Research Congress 2022, pp. 839-848
  • Jason Borenstein, Ronald C Arkin and Alan R Wagner, 2022, "A Metaethical Reflection: The Ethics of Embedding Ethics into Robots", IEEE, Held Virtually, pp. 2
  • Alan R Wagner, 2022, "Modeling Evacuee Behavior for Robot-Guided Emergency Evacuation", International Conference on Robotics and Automation SEANavBench Workshop, Held Virtually, pp. 4
  • Himavanth *Jois and Alan R Wagner, 2022, "Castigation by Robot: Should Robots be Allowed to Punish Us?"
  • Shengkang Chen, Vidullan Surendran, Alan R Wagner, Jason Borenstein and Ronald Arkin, 2022, "Toward Ethical Robotic Behavior in Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios", International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction TRAITS Workshop, arxiv.org, Held Virtually, pp. 2
  • Jason Borenstein, Ronald C Arkin and Alan R Wagner, 2022, "Automated material selection based on detected construction progress", Proceedings of the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), IAARC Publications, Held Virtually, 39, pp. 406-413
  • Vidullan *Surendran and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "Can’t hide your disappointment: Using human pose and facial cues for intent prediction in a target game", IEEE, Held Virtually, pp. 8
  • Ali *Ayub, Helen Hu, Guangwei *Zhou, Carter *Fendley, Crystal Ramsay, Kathy Lou Jackson and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "College Students Cheating on a Collaborative Task with a Social Robot: The Roles of Cheating Exposure and Task Clarity", Held Virtually (64.0% Acceptance Rate), pp. 229-235
  • Vidullan *Surendran, Kasra *Mokhtari and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "Your Robot is Watching 2: Using Emotion Features to Predict the Intent to Deceive", Held Virtually (64.0% Acceptance Rate), pp. 447-453
  • Mollik *Nayyar and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "Aiding Emergency Evacuations Using Obstacle-Aware Path Clearing", IEEE, Held Virtually, pp. 6
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "EEC: Learning to Encode and Regenerate Images for Continual Learning", Held Virtually (28.7% Acceptance Rate), pp. 16
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "Continual Learning of Visual Concepts for Robots through Limited Supervision", Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Held Virtually (37.5% Acceptance Rate), pp. 610–612
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2021, "F-SIOL-330: A Robotic Dataset and Benchmark for Few-Shot Incremental Object Learning", arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.12242, Held Virtually (48.0% Acceptance Rate), pp. 7
  • Mollik *Nayyar, Zachary *Zoloty, Ciera *McFarland and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Exploring the Effect of Explanations during Robot-Guided Emergency Evacuation", Held Virtually (25% acceptance for oral presentation), pp. 13-22
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "What am I allowed to do here?: Online Learning of Context-Specific Norms by Pepper", Held Virtually (25% acceptance for oral presentation), pp. 220-231
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Teach Me What You Want to Play: Learning Variants of Connect Four through Human-Robot Interaction", Held Virtually (55% acceptance), pp. 502-515
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Tell me what this is: Few-Shot Incremental Object Learning by a Robot", Held Virtually (47% Acceptance Rate), pp. 8344-8350
  • Kasra *Mokhtari, Kendra Lang and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Don't go that way! Risk-aware Decision Making for Autonomous Vehicles", Held Virtually (25% acceptance for oral presentation), pp. 284-295
  • Kasra *Mokhtari, Vidullan *Surendran, Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Pedestrian Density Based Path Recognition and Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles", Naples, Italy, pp. 517-524
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Centroid Based Concept Learning for RGB-D Indoor Scene Classification", Virtual (29.1 % Acceptance Rate), pp. 13
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Online Learning of Objects through Curiosity-Driven Active Learning", eprint arXiv:2103.07758, pp. 5
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Storing Encoded Episodes as Concepts for Continual Learning", eprint arXiv:2007.06637, pp. 7
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "Cognitively-Inspired Model for Incremental Learning Using a Few Examples", pp. 222-232
  • Maryam Zare, Ali *Ayub, Aishan Liu, Sweekar Sudhakara, Alan R Wagner and Rebecca Passonneau, 2020, "Dialogue Policies for Learning Board Games through Multimodal Communication", Held Virtually (39% Acceptance Rate), pp. 339-351
  • Matthew Rhudy, Scott *Dolan and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "A Pilot Study on Monitoring Airline Pilot Stress Levels", Orlando, FL, pp. 6
  • Kasra *Mokhtari and Alan R Wagner, 2020, "The Pedestrian Patterns Dataset", eprint arXiv:2001.01816, pp. 6
  • Vidullan *Surendran and Alan R Wagner, 2019, "Your Robot is Watching: Using Surface Cues to Evaluate the Trustworthiness of Human Actions", IEEE, New Delhi, India (54% Acceptance Rate), pp. 8
  • Mollik *Nayyar and Alan R Wagner, 2019, "Effective Robot Evacuation Strategies in Emergencies", IEEE, New Delhi, India (54% Acceptance Rate), pp. 6
  • Maryam Zare, Ali *Ayub, Alan R Wagner and Rebecca Passonneau, 2019, "Show Me How to Win: A Robot that Uses Dialog Management to Learn from Demonstrations", Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), pp. 1-7
  • Ronald C Arkin, Jason Borenstein and Alan R Wagner, 2019, "Competing Ethical Frameworks Mediated by Moral Emotions in HRI: Motivations, Background, and Approach", London, United Kingdom, pp. 8
  • Sagar *Lakhmani, Jacob Langelaan and Alan R Wagner, 2018, "Human-intuitable Collision Avoidance for Autonomous and Semi-Autonomous Aerial Vehicles", Phoenix, AZ, pp. 6
  • Sachin *Hagaribommanahalli and Alan R Wagner, 2018, "Initial Steps towards Quadcopter-based Brick Placement for Construction", Phoenix, AZ, pp. 6
  • Alan R Wagner, 2018, "An Autonomous Architecture that Protects the Right to Privacy", New Orleans, LA. (34% Acceptance Rate), pp. 8
  • Mollik *Nayyar and Alan R Wagner, 2018, "When Should a Robot Apologize? Understanding how Timing Affects Human-Robot Trust Repair", Quingdao, China (58% Acceptance Rate), pp. 265-274
  • Ali *Ayub and Alan R Wagner, 2018, "Learning to Win Games in a Few Examples: Using Game-Theory and Demonstrations to Learn the Win Conditions of a Connect Four Game", Quingdao, China (58% Acceptance Rate), pp. 349-358
  • Alan R Wagner and Mollik *Nayyar, 2017, "A Theoretical Conceptualization of Overtrust", Springer, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 261-269
  • Alan R Wagner, 2016, "Using Games to Learn Games: Game-Theory Representations as a Source for Guided Social Learning", Kansas City, MO (92% Acceptance Rate), pp. 42–51
  • Paul ^Robinette, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna M Howard, 2016, "Assessment of robot to human instruction conveyance modalities across virtual, remote and physical robot presence", New York, NY (47% Acceptance Rate), pp. 1044–1050
  • Paul ^Robinette, Wenchen ^Li, Robert *Allen, Ayanna M Howard and Alan R Wagner, 2016, "Overtrust of robots in emergency evacuation scenarios", Christchurch, New Zealand (24.8% Acceptance Rate), pp. 101–108
  • Zsolt Kira, Wenchen ^Li, Robert ^Allen and Alan R Wagner, 2016, "Leveraging Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Understanding of Everyday Environments", New York, NY, pp. 6
  • Alan R Wagner, 2015, "The Most Intelligent Robots Are Those That Exaggerate: Examining Robot Exaggeration", Washington, DC, pp. 51-57
  • Paul ^Robinette, Ayanna M Howard and Alan R Wagner, 2015, "Timing is Key for Robot Trust Repair", Paris, France (56% Acceptance Rate), pp. 574-583
  • Jigar ^Doshi, Zsolt Kira and Alan R Wagner, 2015, "From Deep Learning to Episodic Memories: Creating Categories of Visual Experiences", Atlanta, GA, pp. 15
  • Zsolt Kira, Alan R Wagner, Chris Kennedy, Jason Zutty and Grady Tuell, 2015, "STAC: a comprehensive sensor fusion model for scene characterization", Baltimore, MD, pp. 949804–949804
  • Paul ^Robinette, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna M Howard, 2014, "Assessment of robot guidance modalities conveying instructions to humans in emergency situations", Edinburgh, United Kingdom (47% Acceptance Rate), pp. 1043–1049
  • Paul ^Robinette, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna M Howard, 2014, "Modeling human-robot trust in emergencies", Palo Alto, CA, pp. 6
  • Alan R Wagner and Jigar ^Doshi, 2013, "Who, how, where: Using exemplars to learn social concepts", Bristol, United Kingdom. (51% Acceptance Rate), pp. 481–490
  • Alan R Wagner, 2013, "Developing Robots that Recognize When They Are Being Trusted.", Palo Alto, CA, pp. 84-89
  • Paul ^Robinette, Alan R Wagner and Ayanna M Howard, 2013, "Building and maintaining trust between humans and guidance robots in an emergency", Palo Alto, CA, pp. 78-83
  • Willie Barnett, Alan R Wagner and Kathleen Ketting, 2013, "Social Robots and Older Adults: Some Ethical Concerns for Researchers", Wrexham, United Kingdom, pp. 364-366
  • David Atkinson, Peter Hancock, Robert R Hoffman, John D Lee, Ericka Rovira, Charlene Stokes and Alan R Wagner, 2012, "Trust In Computers And Robots: The Uses And Boundaries Of The Analogy To Interpersonal Trust", 56, (1), pp. 303–307
  • Alan R Wagner, 2012, "The impact of stereotyping errors on a robot’s social development", San Diego, CA, pp. 1–6
  • Alan R Wagner, 2012, "Using cluster-based stereotyping to foster human-robot cooperation", Vilamoura, Portugal (39% Acceptance Rate), pp. 1615–1622
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald C Arkin, 2011, "Recognizing situations that demand trust", Atlanta, GA, pp. 7–14
  • Alan R Wagner, 2011, "Outcome Matrix Based Phrase Selection", Washington, DC, pp. 41-46
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald C Arkin, 2009, "Robot deception: recognizing when a robot should deceive", Daejeon, Korea, pp. 46–54
  • Alan R Wagner, 2009, "Creating and using matrix representations of social interaction", San Diego, CA (19% Acceptance Rate), pp. 125–132
  • Alan R Wagner, 2008, "A Representation for Interaction", Pasadena, CA, pp. 13-20
  • Patrick Ulam, Yoichiro Endo, Alan R Wagner and Ronald Arkin, 2007, "Integrated mission specification and task allocation for robot teams-design and implementation", Rome, Italy (43% Acceptance Rate), pp. 4428–4435
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald C Arkin, 2006, "A Framework for Situation-based Social Interaction", Hatfield, United Kingdom, pp. 291–297
  • Alan R Wagner, Yoichiro Endo, Patrick Ulam and Ronald C Arkin, 2006, "Multi-robot user interface modeling", Minneapolis, MN, pp. 237–248
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald Arkin, 2004, "Multi-robot communication-sensitive reconnaissance", New Orleans, LA, pp. 4674–4681
  • Alan R Wagner and Ronald C Arkin, 2003, "Internalized plans for communication-sensitive robot team behaviors", Las Vegas, NV, pp. 2480–2487

Research Projects

  • June 2021 - May 2026, "CAREER: No Time to Explain: Developing Robots that Actively Prevent Overtrust during Emergencies," (Sponsor: National Science Foundation).
  • February 2019 - January 2024, "S&AS: INT: COLLAB: Do the Right Thing: Competing Ethical Frameworks Mediated by Moral Emotions in Human Robot Interaction," (Sponsor: National Science Foundation).
  • October 2019 - September 2024, "FW-HTF-RM: Collaborative Research: Future of Construction Work at the Human-Technology Frontier," (Sponsor: National Science Foundation).
  • October 2018 - December 2023, "NRI: INT: COLLAB: Interactive and collaborative robot-assisted emergency evacuations," (Sponsor: National Science Foundation).
  • September 2020 - September 2023, "Trust in Machine Agents Under Realistic Threat," (Sponsor: University of California at Merced).

Honors and Awards

  • Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award, National Science Foundation, 2021 - 2026
  • Hartz Family Career Development Professorship in Engineering, Penn State University, 2017 - 2020
  • Best Paper of 2018, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) Journal, 2018 - 2019
  • US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, National Academy of Engineering, 2019
  • Young Investigator Award, Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, 2013 - 2016
  • Time Magazine’s Top 50 inventions of 2010 (#13), Time Magazine, 2010

Service

Service to Penn State:

Service to External Organizations:

 


 

About

The Penn State Department of Aerospace Engineering, established in 1961 and the only aerospace engineering department in Pennsylvania, is consistently recognized as one of the top aerospace engineering departments in the nation, and is also an international leader in aerospace education, research, and engagement. Our undergraduate program is ranked 15th and our graduate programs are ranked 15th nationally by U.S. News & World Report, while one in 25 holders of a B.S. degree in aerospace engineering in the U.S. earned it from Penn State. Our students are consistently among the most highly recruited by industry, government, and graduate schools nationwide.

The department is built upon the fundamentals of academic integrity, innovation in research, and commitment to the advancement of industry. Through an innovative curriculum and world-class instruction that reflects current industry practice and embraces future trends, Penn State Aerospace Engineering graduates emerge as broadly educated, technically sound aerospace engineers who will become future leaders in a critical industry

Department of Aerospace Engineering

308 Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building

556 White Course Drive

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802

Phone: 814-865-2569