Clarissa Costen

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Clarissa Costen is a rising researcher at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and human-machine interaction. Her work focuses on developing shared autonomy systems—frameworks where both human operators and AI agents collaboratively control robotic platforms. Costen’s key contribution lies in formalizing these interactions through stochastic operator models, which treat human behavior as a probabilistic process. This allows the system to intelligently decide, at each timestep, which operator should take control to maximize overall performance and safety. Her most-cited paper, "Shared Autonomy Systems with Stochastic Operator Models" (2022), has garnered 6 citations and lays the groundwork for more adaptive and trustworthy human-robot collaboration. By explicitly modeling the uncertainty and variability in human decision-making, Costen’s work addresses a critical bottleneck in deploying autonomous systems in real-world settings, from assistive robotics to autonomous driving. Her research is particularly notable for bridging control theory and cognitive science, offering a principled approach to designing systems that can fluidly hand off control between humans and AI. As the field moves toward more seamless human-robot teams, Costen’s stochastic modeling framework provides a rigorous foundation for ensuring both efficiency and operator trust.