Sydney Thompson

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Sydney Thompson is an emerging researcher at the forefront of human-robot interaction (HRI), with a focus on social robotics, real-world robot deployment, and human intent prediction. Their work addresses some of the most pressing challenges in making robots functional and meaningful in everyday public environments. Thompson's most notable contribution to the field is a critical examination of how "social context" is conceptualized in HRI research, arguing that inconsistent usage of the term creates barriers to effective communication and collaboration across the community. This conceptual clarification work, already accumulating citations since its 2025 publication, signals Thompson's commitment to strengthening the theoretical foundations of the discipline. On the applied side, Thompson introduced Shutter, an innovative low-cost, flexible social robot platform specifically designed for in-the-wild deployments, addressing a significant gap left by expensive or proprietary alternatives. Complementing this, their development of the People Approaching Robots Database (PAR-D) provides the research community with a valuable resource for studying how humans signal intent to interact with public robots. Though early in their career, with a growing citation record across all three works, Thompson is establishing themselves as a thoughtful and practical contributor to the future of social robotics.