Jocelyn Shen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Human Media

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Jocelyn Shen is a leading researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI), personalization, and socially assistive technology. Her work focuses on developing adaptive artificial agents that can form long-term, meaningful relationships with people, particularly in educational and social service contexts. Shen’s most cited paper, “Lifelong Personalization via Gaussian Process Modeling for Long-Term HRI” (2021, 9 citations), introduces a novel framework for agents that continuously learn and adapt to individual users over extended interactions—a critical step toward deploying robots in real-world, longitudinal settings. She also explores the profound potential of robots as social proxies in her 2025 work (6 citations), investigating how robotic platforms can foster empathy and connection between humans, even when used asynchronously. In educational technology, Shen’s research on transferrable personalized student models (2021, 3 citations) demonstrates how adaptive game-based agents can improve learning outcomes by tailoring their behavior to each student. Her contributions are shaping the future of empathetic, personalized AI, with implications for healthcare, education, and social robotics.