Jane Courtney

The University of Texas at Austin, Technological University Dublin

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Dr. Jane Courtney is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI) and computer vision, with a career spanning foundational robotics to cutting-edge social robotics. Her early landmark work, "Robot guidance using computer vision" (1984, 61 citations), established core principles for vision-based robotic navigation, influencing generations of autonomous systems. More recently, Dr. Courtney has focused on the nuanced dynamics of situated HRI, creating the "HRI-confusion" multimodal dataset (2025) to model and detect user confusion during task-oriented interactions. This dataset, collected from 28 diverse participants (17 female, 9 male, 1 non-binary), captures facial and body video recordings to enable real-time detection of user social behaviors and confusion states—a critical step toward more responsive, empathetic robots. Her contributions bridge classical robotics and modern affective computing, demonstrating a sustained commitment to making robots not only functional but socially intelligent. Dr. Courtney’s work continues to shape how machines perceive and adapt to human emotional and cognitive states, with lasting impact on both technical and ethical dimensions of HRI.