

Dr. Chris Birmingham
Human-Robot Interaction Researcher and Software Engineer
BIOGRAPHY
Chris Birmingham is a human-robot interaction researcher and software engineer at Semio AI. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in March 2023 with a concentration in Socially Assistive Robotics. His dissertation, Multiparty Human-Robot Interaction: Methods For Facilitating Social Support, developed computational models of group dynamics (e.g., turn-taking and trust) and a facilitation framework grounded in empathy and disclosure. Chris builds open-source tools for reproducible HRI, including HCI-FACE (a web-based facial animation and conversation engine) and HARMONI (a ROS-based modular interaction framework). His work spans multimodal perception, time-series modeling for affect recognition, and end-to-end deployment across cloud and robot platforms.



