Jesse Thomason has seen his research evolve over the last decade. 

It began with a focus on helping computer systems incorporate human language into their perception of the world. Could a robot tell humans that a heavy object is straining its arm? Does it know that a container makes a sound when it is picked up or dropped?

Now, Thomason’s research has become more human-centered, which is one reason he feels at home as he joins the faculty at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor.

Thomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.

He will move his Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observation, and Robots (GLAMOR) lab to Tech. The lab explores methods for connecting natural language processing to robotics.

While pursuing his computer science Ph.D. at the University of Texas, Thomason researched early NLP systems before large-language models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini were introduced.

Thomason then expanded into robotics to explore how roboticists can create new ways to communicate with robots using computational representations of language.

“The idea was you could do something that looked like robot programming without as much engineering work if you used one of these coding modules to create a language-code interface,” Thomason said. 

When OpenAI and Google released their commercial LLMs in 2022, Thomason felt a seismic shift.

“That area of NLP and robotics became more crowded and accessible with the advent of (LLMs),” Thomason said. “It created a huge inroad to roboticists being able to plug and play language technologies in a way they couldn’t before. Robotics hardware has also become much cheaper and more standardized.”

But as LLMs became universal tools accessible to everyone, Thomason said he started thinking more about how he could improve optimization for users.

“I became most interested in how language interfaces, starting in 2022, were suddenly everywhere,” he said. “Everybody had a chatbot on their phone. I wanted to see what we could do as researchers to make the interaction between an AI system like a language model and a person smoother and more beneficial.”

Thomason said he felt he needed a new environment where end users were at the center of the technology design process. He was drawn to the School of Interactive Computing for its reputation in human-computer interaction research.

“That was a big factor in my decision to move to the School of Interactive Computing, where you value that kind of human-centered computing,” he said. 

“With the strong HCI researchers here, I have an opportunity to learn more from my colleagues about how to run high-quality human-subject studies, conduct participatory design, and identify actual users of a potential system and talk to them about what would be helpful.”