Research
Interested prospective graduate students should apply to the Color Science MS or PhD programs at Rochester Institute of Technology (January 15 deadline annually). Prospective students should also feel free to contact me directly if they would like any additional information.
Human interaction is fundamental to most aspects of life, and the ways in which we interact with others is ever-changing. People constantly interact with other social agents - often with real humans in the natural world, but also increasingly frequently with digital or artificial representations of humans through video displays, avatars, and emerging technologies like social robots, and extended reality devices. My research program aims to better understand how social agents are perceived and evaluated in real and virtual environments.
This research focuses largely on the color appearance of human and human-like faces. I describe some of the themes of our recent, ongoing, and prospective research topics below:
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How do social, cognitive, and visual systems work to detect and perceive subtle changes in facial color?
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How do visual features (colorimetric, color heterogeneity, textual details, transparency) impact the judgments we make (preference, realism, social inferences like emotion) about social agents?
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How do people evaluate appearance of social agents in extended reality environments (VR/AR/XR)? What challenges are introduced for perceiving and interacting with social agents within these emerging display technologies?
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How does social perception work differently when perceiving real humans versus other types of artificial social agents?
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What are the limitations of imparting human-like expressions of emotion onto social robots? How might we usefully augment or impart novel expressions of emotion to artificial social agents?
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How should we consider designing social agent appearance models? Are there tradeoffs in appearance priorities for different design goals (e.g., Do some appearance features enhance their realism while impairing preferences, or vice-versa)?
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Are there discrepancies between user- vs. other- centered appearance approaches (e.g., how do people evaluate representations of themselves differently than those of others)?
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Measurement of skin color. What are the temporal, spatial, colorimetric, and spectral characteristics of skin as its color changes subtly over a brief period of time? How can we address some specific challenges that arise when trying to accurately measure facial color?