About Me
I am Srutilaya (Sruti) Mani and I am currently a rising third-year undergraduate student at UC San Diego. I am majoring in Mathematics: Computer Science and minoring in Business. I expect to graduate by June 2026.
I am passionate about computer science, robotics, and artificial intelligence, and I want to conduct research in this field in order to further my experience and knowledge.
I am currently an undergraduate researcher in the Healthcare Robotics Lab at UC San Diego, and also have prior internship experience.
If you have any questions, please contact me at s1mani@ucsd.edu.
About My Mentor
Dr. Laurel Riek is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, with a joint appointment in the Department of Emergency Medicine, and is affiliated with the Contextual Robotics Institute and Design Lab. Dr. Riek directs the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and leads research in human-robot interaction (HRI), assistive and accessible technology, embodied AI, and health informatics. Dr. Riek’s current research projects have applications in acute care, neuro-rehabilitation, and home health. The lab is very interested in supporting health equity through community health efforts.
Dr. Riek received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, and B.S. in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon. Riek served as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at The MITRE Corporation from 2000-2008, working on learning and vision systems for robots, and held the Clare Boothe Luce chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame from 2011-2016.
Dr. Riek has received the NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, Qualcomm Research Award, and multiple best paper awards. Riek’s research has been supported by the NSF, AFOSR, ONR, DOE, and a number of companies and foundations.
Dr. Riek currently serves as HRI Editor for the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Human Robot Interaction (THRI), and previously served as the HRI 2023 General Co-Chair and HRI 2020 Program Co-Chair.
About My Project
This summer, I am working on an HRI project that aims to contextualize and develop robots that will help clinicians in their daily tasks. This robot is designed to support clinicians in the hospital space by performing non-critical tasks.
I am working on an iOS application through which clinicians can control the robot. I am implementing the backend of the application using the Swift programming language and will evaluate and test it with real clinicians. The application will allow clinicians to request various tasks for the robot to perform.
During this project, I will be working with a Ph.D. student in Dr. Riek’s lab as well as with two other undergraduate students.