Saunak Kumar Panda

Saunak Kumar Panda

Postdoctoral Scholar, Human-Centered AI Institute, University of Houston

Grants and Proposals

2026

Collaborative Research: Causal Observability and Diagnosis for Human-Robot Interactions Failures in Manufacturing

Senior Personnel · NSF ADMO · PI: Dr. Yisha Xiang

Proposal in preparation

Developing the task “Causal LLM reasoning-trajectory RL” to improve diagnosis of human–robot interaction failures. The proposed work uses reinforcement learning with intermediate causal-reasoning rewards and investigates generative training scenarios to improve generalization across manufacturing tasks.

Planned submission: October 2, 2026

2026

Collaborative Research: Smart, Secure and Scalable (S3) Health Monitoring of Large Populations via Online Collaborative Learning

Other Personnel · NSF Smart and Connected Health (SCH) · PI: Dr. Ying Lin

Proposal in preparation

Contributing to the Human-Centered Recommendation thrust by developing interpretable treatment-goal recommendation methods for Applied Behavior Analysis, with an emphasis on clinician-facing decision support and experimental evaluation.

Planned submission: October 2026