{"692319":{"#nid":"692319","#data":{"type":"news","title":"New Associate Professor Sees Research Becoming More Human-Centered","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EJesse Thomason has seen his research evolve over the last decade.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt 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?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENow, Thomason\u2019s research has become more human-centered, which is one reason he feels at home as he joins the faculty at Georgia Tech\u2019s School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhile 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThomason then expanded into robotics to explore how roboticists can create new ways to communicate with robots using computational representations of language.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThe 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,\u201d Thomason said.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhen OpenAI and Google released their commercial LLMs in 2022, Thomason felt a seismic shift.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThat area of NLP and robotics became more crowded and accessible with the advent of (LLMs),\u201d Thomason said. \u201cIt created a huge inroad to roboticists being able to plug and play language technologies in a way they couldn\u2019t before. Robotics hardware has also become much cheaper and more standardized.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBut as LLMs became universal tools accessible to everyone, Thomason said he started thinking more about how he could improve optimization for users.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cI became most interested in how language interfaces, starting in 2022, were suddenly everywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cEverybody 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.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThomason 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThat was a big factor in my decision to move to the School of Interactive Computing, where you value that kind of human-centered computing,\u201d he said.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cWith 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.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EJesse Thomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Jesse Thomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science."}],"uid":"36530","created_gmt":"2026-09-04 13:14:34","changed_gmt":"2026-09-04 13:16:02","author":"Nathan Deen","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","location":"Atlanta, GA","dateline":{"date":"2026-09-04T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2026-09-04T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"681069":{"id":"681069","type":"image","title":"Jesse-Thomason_86A6990-copy.jpg","body":null,"created":"1788527693","gmt_created":"2026-09-04 13:14:53","changed":"1788527693","gmt_changed":"2026-09-04 13:14:53","alt":"Jesse Thomason","file":{"fid":"265421","name":"Jesse-Thomason_86A6990-copy.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/2026\/09\/04\/Jesse-Thomason_86A6990-copy.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/2026\/09\/04\/Jesse-Thomason_86A6990-copy.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":122256,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/2026\/09\/04\/Jesse-Thomason_86A6990-copy.jpg?itok=7bxT6Bs5"}}},"media_ids":["681069"],"groups":[{"id":"47223","name":"College of Computing"},{"id":"50876","name":"School of Interactive Computing"}],"categories":[{"id":"194606","name":"Artificial Intelligence"},{"id":"153","name":"Computer Science\/Information Technology and Security"},{"id":"152","name":"Robotics"}],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"193655","name":"Artificial Intelligence at Georgia Tech"},{"id":"39501","name":"People and Technology"},{"id":"39521","name":"Robotics"}],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}