SEAS PhD candidate receives first place in NeuroDesign Innovation

By Elizabeth Egan 

“I am incredibly thankful to the judges and community for recognizing the significance of my work and giving me the chance to present. This is an enormous honor,” said Distefano, who added that he greatly valued the opportunity to learn about research projects happening around the world.

Ten teams of finalists were selected to present at the hybrid conference, based in Yokohama, Japan in May. The projects were chosen for exemplifying groundbreaking innovation within human-robot interaction NeuroDesign, which is the intersection between design thinking, neuroscience and human-robot interaction.

Distefano’s paper, Observational Error-Related Negativity for Trust Evaluation in Human-Swarm Interaction, was co-authored by Souma Chowdhury and Ehsan Esfahani, associate professors in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.  

Their paper explored how the growing autonomy of artificial intelligence (AI) affects trust and support for future AI as the human role shifts from operating robotic agents to supervising them. They conducted an experimental study in a simulation environment, called SHaSTA, that Distefano developed in 2021 to gauge Observation Error Related Negativity (oERN) in test subjects as they performed tasks with swarm platoons of robots that were set to operate with varying levels of compliance.

“Our goal was to design and augment artificial intelligence with human physiological information,” said Distefano. “We wanted to look into human trust in AI systems.”

Distefano first became interested in human-AI systems during an undergraduate research project in Esfahani’s lab, in which he designed and fabricated a mechanical gripper and control with a brain computer interface.

“I would like to thank Dr. Ehsan Esfahani, who took me under his wing as an undergraduate student and all the way through a doctorate degree,” said Distefano of Esfahani, who went on to become his PhD advisor. “I love the University at Buffalo and am thankful for being here,” said Distefano, adding that on top of his academic work, he is also the drumline technician for UB’s Thunder of the East Marching Band.

After his degree conferral on August 31, Distefano plans to start working at a tech startup. He noted that his goal is to use his degree to help humanity, whether that be through developing technology to help people or keeping humans out of harm’s way.