Ian's research is on developmental robotics and human-robot interaction. The first topic seeks to answer: how can a (human or robot) baby discover basic low-level perceptual and motor concepts through prolonged autonomous interactions with the world? The second topic broadens this to include social concepts, such as emotions, gaze-following, and turn-taking, and incorporates both care-giving and explicit teaching into the developmental process as well. This work mostly involves application and development of machine learning methods to robots which must interact with objects and people in the world in real-time.