Alan Wagner

Alan Wagner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Penn State University. His research integrates social psychology, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence to develop frameworks for human-robot socialization, focusing on trust calibration, deception reasoning, and relationship modeling.

Research interests include:

• Cognitive realism in game-theoretic social behavior models
• Trust dynamics during emergency evacuations
• Context-specific norm learning for robots
• Human-robot collaborative task execution
• Adaptive turn-taking routines
• Image encoding for continual learning

Project funding highlights:

• $500K NSF CAREER grant for trust calibration in emergencies
• $455K AFOSR grant for cognitive realism
• $698K NSF grant for human-technology frontier construction work
• $20K NSWC Crane grant for object recognition

Scientific recognition:

• Best Paper Award Finalist (ARSO 2021)