Michael F. Xu

I am a fourth year graduate student in the CS department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I study how robots can support human connection and collaboration. My research in human-robot interaction focuses on agentic robots that can take initiative and adapt as interactions unfold. I am interested in how their behavior can respond to different people’s goals and expectations, and how people can shape and redirect that behavior over time. I investigate these questions across in-home, public, and laboratory settings, using participatory design, field deployments, and experiments.