Tianmin Shu

Tianmin Shu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Cognitive Science. He is the founding director of the Social Cognitive AI (SCAI) Lab and was previously a Research Scientist at MIT, working with Josh Tenenbaum and Antonio Torralba.

His research goal is to advance human-centered AI by engineering machine social intelligence—building systems that understand, reason about, and interact with humans in real-world settings. His work is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and social cognition.

Research Interests:

• Theory of Mind Reasoning: Developing models that infer human mental states from multimodal behavioral data.
• Embodied Assistance: Creating agents capable of assisting humans in physical environments through verbal and non-verbal collaboration.
• Learning from Human Feedback: Extracting reward-relevant preferences from rich human input to guide agent behavior.
• Social Scene Understanding: Recognizing and reasoning about group activities and social roles from visual and physical cues.
• Computational Social Cognition: Modeling how humans perceive and interpret social and physical interactions.

Scientific Awards:

• Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024 for "MMToM-QA: Multimodal Theory of Mind Question Answering"

Grants & Collaborations:
Tianmin Shu has led or co-organized several high-impact workshops and tutorials, including the NeurIPS 2023 Tutorial on "Language Models Meet World Models" and the RSS 2024 Workshop on "Social Intelligence in Humans and Robots". His lab has also developed open-source platforms like VirtualHome-Social and SimWorld for multi-agent interaction research.

Lab & Team:
As director of the Social Cognitive AI (SCAI) Lab at Johns Hopkins University, Tianmin Shu leads a multidisciplinary team focused on building socially intelligent systems. His lab is located in Malone Hall 213 and collaborates closely with the Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science.