Rate My Professor Hae Won Park

Hae Won Park is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab in the Personal Robots Group. She serves as Principal Investigator for the Social Robot Companions for Aging Program, where she leads efforts on the long-term personalization of interactive AI systems to support human flourishing. Her work centers on developing social robots and agents that personalize deeply over extended interactions, using computational models of mental processes inferred from verbal and nonverbal cues to address challenges such as data sparsity through transfer learning and collective knowledge across interfaces.

Prior to her role at MIT, Park earned her PhD at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech, where she was a member of the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory advised by Professor Ayanna Howard. During her doctoral studies, she co-founded Zyrobotics, a Georgia Tech spin-off company that licenses three patents from her research. Her research specializations include human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, socially interactive agents, and applications in early childhood education, healthcare, eldercare, family interaction, and emotional wellness.