bio

Dr. Shiwali Mohan is a Principal AI Scientist at SRI, Future Concepts. She studies the design and analysis of collaborative agents. Her research brings together methods from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with insights from human-centered sciences to design systems that can collaborate with humans effectively. Her research has had an inter-disciplinary impact and has been published at venues for research on AI, human cognition, cognitive systems, human-computer interaction (HCI), medical informatics, AI for social good, and robotics.

Dr. Mohan has served as a principal investigator for grants from DARPA and AFOSR and as a key personnel on grants from ARPA-E, DOE, and other government agencies. She leads SRI’s research agenda on collaborative agent systems. She is known for building human-centered agents that are designed with significant consideration to human factors. Her work on intelligent coaching systems for health behavior change was one of the first demonstrations of long-term, interactive, intelligent behavior that was evaluated with human trainees in ecological settings. During her doctoral research, she led the development of Rosie - a complex agent with end-to-end behavior including natural language processing, flexible dialog, computer vision, action control, and interactive learning. This research paved the way for a new challenge problem for integrated AI systems research - Interactive Task Learning. With John Laird, she won the Blue Sky Award at AAAI 2018 for proposing a novel framework that integrates statistical learning with cognitive reasoning for complex intelligent behavior. She is a rising leader in the AI community. She served as the chair for AAAI Doctoral Consortium at AAAI 2020 & 2021 and co-chaired the annual meeting of the Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS) community in 2020.

Dr. Mohan received her B.E. in Instrumentation and Control Engineering from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Delhi University. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a focus on artificial intelligence.

Shiwali is graduate of the Soar lab led by John E. Laird that traces its legacy to foundational research on human cognition by Allen Newell and human decision making by Herbert Simon. Her graduate experience set me on this wonderful journey in studying the computational underpinnings of human intelligence and building intelligent systems that support people in their goals. PARC’s and SRI’s legacy in leveraging cognitive psychology to design more effective technology has only made this journey more adventurous.