Elizabeth Phillips

Elizabeth Phillips

Elizabeth Phillips

Assistant Professor

Human Factors/Applied Cognition: Human-robot interaction, human-like robots, autonomous and adaptive systems, human-human teams, applications for augmented and virtual reality, diversity in robotics

Elizabeth "Beth" Phillips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Group at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology from the University of Central Florida and completed her Post-Doctoral work in the Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative at Brown University. 

Her expertise is in human interactions with robots, autonomous systems, and related technologies like augmented and virtual reality. She studies how we can design these systems to be better partners and teammates for people in the near future. She has an interest in how robots and other technologies are changing the way we interact with the world and one another, including the future of human relationships. Her research background is diverse and interdisciplinary and includes collaborations with researchers in the departments of engineering and industrial design, computer science, cognitive science, and commercial product companies outside of the university. 

She is also the co-creator of the Anthropomorphic RoBOT (ABOT) database, a collection of images of and data about real-world human-like robots. ABOT was created as a resource to enable systematic, generalizable, and reproducible research on the psychological effects of robots’ human-like appearance.

If you are a student interested in volunteering to work on research projects please fill out this form: shorturl.at/cgxK2

Selected Publications

Rothstein, N., de Visser E. J., and Phillips, E. (2021). Perceptions of infidelity with sex robots. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction ‘HRI

Kim, B., Wen, R., Zhu, Q., Williams, T., and Phillips, E., (2021). Robots as moral advisers: The effects of deontological, virtue, and Confucian ethics on encouraging honest behavior. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Alt.HRI

Hetrick, R., Amerson, N., Kim, B., Rosen, E., de Visser, E. J., & Phillips, E. (2020). Testing workload and usability of virtual reality interfaces for the control of robots. IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium.

Zhao, X., Phillips, E., and Malle., B.F (2020). Appearing human: The landscape of humanlike robots and its impact on human inferences of machine intelligence. Academy of Management Annual Meeting.

Yitzhak, S., Rosen, E., Chien, G., Phillips, E., Tellex, S., & Konidaris, G. (2019) End-user programming using mixed reality. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada.

Phillips, E., Zhoa, X., Ullman, D., & Malle, B.F. (2018). What is human-like?: Decomposing human-like appearance using the Anthropomorphic RoBOT (ABOT) Database. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction ‘HRI (pp.105-113). ACM

 

 

Courses Taught

Fall 2020: Cognitive Psychology Psych 317

Spring 2021: Cognitive Psychology Psych 317

Fall 2021: Human-Systems Interaction Psych 786

Spring 2022: Cognitive Psychology Psych 317

Education

B.S. Psychology, University of Central Florida

M.A. Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology, University of Central Florida

Ph.D. Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology, University of Central Florida

Post-Doc Humanity Centered Robotics, Brown University