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About

Mithun George Jacob is a robotics and human-robot interaction researcher whose work has significantly advanced the field of intelligent surgical assistance systems. He is best known for pioneering the **Gestonurse** series of robotic scrub nurse (RSN) systems, which enable surgeons to request and receive surgical instruments through natural hand gestures and voice commands during live procedures — reducing human workload and minimizing procedural interruptions. His foundational 2011 paper on Gestonurse alone has garnered 57 citations, with subsequent work collectively amassing over 150 citations across the surgical robotics domain. Jacob's research spans multimodal human-robot communication, cyber-physical systems for operating room management, and optimal modality selection frameworks for hybrid human-machine teams. His studies demonstrated measurable improvements in surgeons' economy of movement and instrument retrieval efficiency, lending clinical credibility to robotic assistance in the OR. Beyond surgical robotics, his more recent contributions explore generalist AI models for physical robotic agents, including collaborative work on Gemini Robotics in 2025. Jacob's career reflects a consistent drive to bridge intelligent systems with real-world human collaboration — from the operating table to the frontier of embodied AI.