IROS 2026 Workshop — Toward Human-Level Robotic Teammates
LEIA Lab is organizing a half-day workshop at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA, asking how we get from task-specific skills to robots that truly think, reason, and collaborate. Submissions are open through August 30, 2026 — join us in person or online.
Why Cognitive Robotics Matters — Selected for IROS 2026
Our paper evaluating whether LLMs can replicate cognitive architecture capabilities within HARMONIC for safety-critical robot teaming has been selected for presentation at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026) in Pittsburgh, PA.
AAAI-MAKE 2026 — LLMs as Knowledge Workers
Companion page for the symposium talk on NeSy vs SyNe, symbolic supervision of LLMs, the OntoAgent knowledge-extension experiment, and themes from the MAKE program.
HARMONIC-IR Wins Inaugural APEX Faculty Translation Grant
Drs. Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg received the $30,000 Faculty Translation Grant in the inaugural Ajit Prabhu '98 Catalyst Fund APEX Awards from RPI's Severino Center, supporting HARMONIC-IR — natural-language robot programming with knowledge-based agents orchestrating LLMs.
NSF National I-Corps Completed — People's Choice Award!
LEIA Lab completed the National NSF I-Corps program and won the People's Choice Award for HARMONIC, conducting 128 customer discovery interviews across defense, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.
ICRA 2025 Paper
HARMONIC presented at ICRA 2025 in Atlanta, GA. The paper demonstrates cognitive robotic teaming in safety-critical maintenance scenarios.
HARMONIC on arXiv
Cognitive-robotic architecture paper released on arXiv, presenting the HARMONIC framework for human-AI robotic teaming.
Agents in the Long Game of AI
New MIT Press book on computational cognitive modeling by McShane and Nirenburg, presenting the long-term vision for OntoAgent-based AI.