Sao Mai Nguyen
Centre Inria de l'université de Bordeaux, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, IHS Markit (United States), IMT Atlantique, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Département d'Informatique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École nationale supérieure de techniques avancées Bretagne, Laboratoire des Sciences et Techniques de l’Information de la Communication et de la Connaissance
Papers
22
Total Citations
367
H-Index
11
About
Sao Mai Nguyen is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of developmental robotics, machine learning, and human-robot interaction, whose work has fundamentally advanced how robots learn, adapt, and assist humans. Her early research focused on intrinsically motivated learning and active exploration, developing cognitive architectures that enable robots to autonomously acquire motor skills and object recognition capabilities through curiosity-driven discovery — work that garnered significant attention, with her 2014 paper on active object learning accumulating 68 citations and her 2012 architecture for socially guided intrinsic motivation earning 47. A hallmark of her contributions is bridging autonomous robot learning with social interaction, demonstrating how human demonstrations can bootstrap and accelerate intrinsic motivation algorithms. More recently, Nguyen has translated these foundations into impactful clinical applications, developing humanoid robot coaches for physical rehabilitation — notably leading the R-COOL randomized trial evaluating robot-supervised exercise for chronic low back pain patients. Her motion analysis frameworks, leveraging tools such as Kinect, OpenPose, and BlazePose, alongside deep learning approaches for daily activity recognition, reflect a researcher consistently pushing robotics toward meaningful real-world impact, accumulating over 290 citations across her most influential work alone.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Object Learning Through Active Exploration68 citations · 2014
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- 4Bootstrapping Intrinsically Motivated Learning with Human Demonstration25 citations · 2012
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