Samuel Spaulding, Jocelyn Shen, HaeWon Park, and Cynthia Breazeal.
AAMAS, 2021
paper
Hi! I'm Jocelyn, a Master's student at the MIT Media Lab in
the Personal Robots Group, advised by
Professor Cynthia
Breazeal. I graduated from MIT in
2021 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science alongside a minor in Economics.
My research is broadly situated in the field of human-centered AI and aims to advance computational approaches for human-AI interactions that promote human-human connection, empathy, and prosociality as well as evaluate where AI systems fail to do so. I believe that responsibly designed AI can be used as a tool to better contextualize, understand, and express the human experience, both on an individual and interpersonal level. My work focuses on developing social and emotional reasoning capabilities in artificial agents in parallel to understanding the mechanisms behind human communicative behaviors. I use these insights to design new human-AI interactions that foster prosocial interactions. Additionally, I am interested in evaluating the underlying capabilities, safety, and alignment of social-emotional AI systems and place a strong emphasis on assessing the impact of interactive systems in the real world, across applications including emotional wellbeing, communications, and learning.
In the past, I've worked at
Facebook
(Software Engineering Intern), Citadel (Software
Engineering Intern), and Affectiva (Data Science
Intern), where I've developed full stack applications, backend infrastructures, and machine learning
pipelines. Aside from my work,
I like to sketch characters and write anything ranging from poems
to essays to novels. My awarded creative works often center around themes of racial identity, the
meaning of art, and the digital age.
Check out the rest of this site to learn more, and feel free to reach out!
Samuel Spaulding, Jocelyn Shen, HaeWon Park, and Cynthia Breazeal.
AAMAS, 2021
paper
Samuel Spaulding, Jocelyn Shen, HaeWon Park, and Cynthia Breazeal.
Frontiers
in Robotics and AI, 2021
paper
Alexander B. Brummer, Panagiotis Lymperopoulos, Jocelyn Shen, Elif Tekin,
Lisa P. Bentley, Vanessa Buzzard, Andrew Gray, Imma Oliveras, Brian J. Enquist and Van M.
Savage.
Journal of the Royal Society Interface Volume 18, Issue 174, 2021
paper
code
Research paper exploring the effect of a parent's nonverbal cues (body
gesture) on a child's
affect (engagement) during a joint educational task (dialogic reading).
paper
Evalute BERT-based models' abilities to perform various types of
reasoning in multiturn
dialogue
datasets using different pretraining approaches.
paper
Online polling game to test people's knowledge on questions from around
the world
Semifinalist
demo
Mobile application for crowd-sourced natural disaster relief.
1st place (Healthtech)
demo
code
Object detection using Retinanet to help drivers on the road.
presentation
A story about racial identity and love in the digital age, told through a mixture of traditional
narrative and social media messages.
1st prize, MIT Boit Manuscript
Prize
Visual analysis essay of TIME's Welcome to America cover, discussing the relationship between visual
elements and U.S. immigration policies in parallel.
2nd prize, MIT List
Vera Prize for Writing on the Visual Arts
essay
Personal essay on lying for oneself versus lying for others. Explores themes of racial identity and
family.
essay
Personal work, short poem on pollution.
1st Place, Helen Creeley Poetry Prize
Personal work, short poem on acupuncture and the body.
1st Place, Helen Creeley Poetry Prize
Interviews with the Clinicial Machine Learning Group and Medical Vision Group at MIT on the future
of AI in healthcare.
article
Interviews with researchers at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research on the science of
mental health and the brain.
article
I began teaching myself digital drawing and painting in 2020, and have developed a particular interest in character design and visual storytelling. Below you will find some of my selected pieces. For more artwork and sketches, look for my alias @bnbndog and check out my socials linked below.