About

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University advised by Linda B. Smith at the Cognitive Development Lab. I received my dual Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana University in 2018.

My research focuses on studying the development of interpersonal coordination and unfolding the coupled dynamics and structures of multimodal sensory-motor behaviors in social interaction. To understand how humans develop the flexible social skills to engage in smooth coordination with each other, I conduct infant-parent interaction experiments with state-of-art wearable sensors, such as head-mounted eye-trackers and wireless motion tracking system. I am also enthused about developing novel time series analysis methods to examine and model the mechanism that underlies real-time social coordination or any sets of complex multivariate time series.

To combat the challenges presented in this data intensive era, I joined a wonderful team of researchers to create Peekbank: an open large-scale eye-tracking data repository on children's word recognition development. With this on-going effort, we aim to address the theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development as well as the replicability and reproducibility issues in psychology at large.

During my Ph.D., I used social robotic agents to investigate the effects of different real-time responsive behaviors and statistical learning models in human-robot interaction studies. I obtained a M.S. degree in Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington in 2012, a B.E. degree in Software Engineering at Nanjing University in 2009.

Publications

Zettersten, M., Yurovsky, D., Xu, T. L., Uner, S., Tsui, A., Schneider, R. M., ... & Frank, M. C. (2022). Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children’s word recognition. PsyArXiv

Zettersten, M., Bergey, C. A., Bhatt, N. S., Boyce, V., Braginsky, M., Carstensen, A., ... & Frank, M. C. (2021). Peekbank: Exploring children's word recognition through an open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43, No. 43).

Xu T.L., de Barbaro K., Abney D.H. and Cox R.F.A. (2020). Finding Structure in Time: Visualizing and Analyzing Behavioral Time Series. Frontiers In Psychology. 11:1457. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01457  [github]

Yuan, L., Xu, T. L., Yu, C. & Smith, L. B. (2019). Sustained Visual Attention is More Than Seeing. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 179, 324-336.

Slone, L.K., Abney, D.H., Borjon, J.I., Chen, C.H., Franchak, J.M., Pearcy, D., Suarez-Rivera, C., Xu, T.L., Zhang, Y., Smith, L.B. and Yu, C. (2018). Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior. JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), (141), e58496.

Xu, T.L., Abney, D.H. & Yu, C. (2017). Discovering Multicausality in the Development of Coordinated Behavior. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society . Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.  * accepted as oral presentation (29%) and awarded with The Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation Student Travel Award

Yuan, L., Xu, T.L., Yu, C. & Smith, L.B.(2017). Seeing Is Not Enough for Sustained Visual Attention. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society . Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Xu, T. & Yu, C. (2016). Quantifying Joint Activities using Cross-Recurrance Block Representation. Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, (pp. 1997-2002) . Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.  * accepted as oral presentation (34%) and awarded with The Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation Student Travel Award  [talk slides]  [github]  [video1]  [video2]

Xu, T.L. Zhang, H., and Yu, C. (2016). See You See Me: the Role of Eye Contact in Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 6(1), 2.  [video]

Yu, C., Xu, T., Zhong, Y., and Zhang, H. (2014). Learning to Interact and Interacting to Learn: Active Statistical Learning in Human-Robot Interaction. In Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2014 International Joint Conference on(pp. 684-691). IEEE.

Xu, T., Zhang, H. & Yu, C. (2013). Cooperative Gazing Behaviors in Human Multi-Robot Interaction. Interaction Studies, 14(3), 390-418.  [video]

Yu, C., Yurovsky, D., and Xu, T.L. (2012). Visual Data Mining: An Exploratory Approach to Analyzing Temporal Patterns of Eye Movements. Infancy, 17(1), 33-60.

Xu, T., Yu, C. & Smith, L.B. (2011). It's the Child's Body: The Role of Toddler and Parent in Selecting Toddler's Visual Experience. Proceedings of IEEE 10th International Conference in Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob 2011).

 

Resources

  • Materials on ICIS 2018 workshop Find Structure in Time
  • TIMEVP: Time Series Visualization and Processing Toolkit
  • Cross Recurrence Block Quantification Analysis Toolbox
  • Granger Causality Computation and Stimulation with Point Process Data
  • Tools of the Trade to Become A Scientist for RAs
  • Invited talks & Organized Workshops

  • Xu, T.L. (March 2019). Discovering Temporal Dependency and Directional Influence among Multimodal Behavioral Variables with Granger Causality. The 2019 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Biennial Meeting, Baltimore, MD, USA.
  • Xu, T.L., de Barbaro, K. & Cox, R.F.A. (July 2018). Finding Structure in Time. The 21st International Congress of Infant Studies. Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  • Xu, T.L., Abney, D.H. Smith, L.B. & Yu, C. (July 2018). New Technology Leads to New Discoveries: A Case Study of Using Computational Algorithms to Understand Parent-Infant Interaction. The 21st International Congress of Infant Studies. Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  • Xu, T.L., Abney, D.H. & Yu, C. (July 2017). Discovering Multicausality in the Development of Coordinated Behavior. The 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. London, England, UK.
  • Xu, T.L., (May 2017) Investigating Social Contingencies and Temporal Patterns in Multimodal Coordinated Behaviors. Cognitive Interaction Technology Workshop. Bloomington, IN, USA.
  • Xu, T.L. & Yu, C. (August 2016). Quantifying Joint Activities using Cross Recurrence Block Representation. The 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  • Teaching

  • Guest Lecturer, P657 Machine Learning in Cognitive Science, Spring 2017
  • Associate Instructor, B649 Cloud Computing, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
  • Associate Instructor, B555 Machine Learning, Spring 2013
  • Associate Instructor, B461 Database Concepts, Spring 2012
  • Associate Instructor, B565 Data Mining, Spring 2011
  • Associate Instructor, A348/B548 Mastering the World Wide Web, Spring 2010
  • Associate Instructor, A201 Introduction to Programming in Python, Fall 2010, Summer 2010, Fall 2009
  • All courses were provided at Indiana University Bloomington

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