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About

Gordon Briggs is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, cognitive robotics, and machine ethics. His work fundamentally addresses how autonomous robots can participate meaningfully and safely in human social environments — not merely as tools, but as socially aware agents capable of nuanced communication and moral reasoning. Briggs has made landmark contributions to robotic natural language understanding, particularly in enabling robots to interpret indirect speech acts and pragmatic intent beyond literal commands — work that has collectively accumulated hundreds of citations. His research on directive rejection, most vividly captured in the widely discussed papers *"Sorry, I Can't Do That"* (42 citations) and *"Why and How Robots Should Say 'No'"* (27 citations), challenges the assumption that robots should be unconditionally obedient, arguing instead for principled, context-sensitive refusal mechanisms. Perhaps most provocatively, *"The Case for Robot Disobedience"* stakes out an ethical position that has resonated across robotics and AI ethics communities. Complementing this, his work on moral sensitivity and mental modeling demonstrates how robots can anticipate norm violations and coordinate fluidly with human teammates. With his most-cited paper on robotic protest and distress behaviors garnering 89 citations, Briggs has firmly established himself as a leading voice shaping socially intelligent, ethically grounded robotics.