Case Study: Carnegie Mellon University advances socially aware AI with Google for Education

Carnegie Mellon University - Customer Case Study

Carnegie Mellon University’s Articulab wanted to better understand how robotic assistants could work with people in socially intelligent ways, rather than simply automate tasks. To support this research, the team used Google for Education’s Google Cloud Platform, including Cloud Machine Learning Engine, along with other Google tools such as TensorFlow, Speech API, and Firebase.

Google for Education helped Carnegie Mellon University build SARA, a socially aware robot assistant that can recognize facial expressions, learn user preferences, respond to social cues, and improve recommendations over time. The project was successfully tested with more than 250 conference attendees over four days, and the team found that higher rapport was correlated with better task performance and greater recommendation acceptance, showing measurable value for socially grounded AI.

Carnegie Mellon University

Justine Cassell

Associate Dean for Technology Strategy