Matthew Rueben

Shiley School of Engineering, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Matthew Rueben

Email:

Phone:
503.943.7435

Address:
Shiley Hall 226

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About

Matthew Rueben is a Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Portland's Donald P. Shiley School of Engineering. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (Honors) and a Ph.D. in Robotics, both from Oregon State University.

Dr. Rueben joined the faculty at UP in 2023. Prior to UP, he completed postdoctoral fellowships at the USC Interaction Lab in Los Angeles and at the Intergroup Human-Robot Interaction Lab at New Mexico State University.

Dr. Rueben primarily teaches courses in the Computer Science program. His teaching spans introductory programming courses, a discussion-centric course in professional ethics, and an elective course on user experience (UX) design. He has also advised multi-disciplinary senior capstone project teams in areas such as robotics, augmented reality, and video game development.

Dr. Rueben’s research is in the field of human-robot interaction, with a focus on how people understand what robots "see" with their sensors, and how robots can better communicate about this to improve safety, privacy, and collaboration. He has collaborated with philosophers, legal scholars, and psychologists in addition to engineers and computer scientists. His work has been cited over 750 times by other scholars.

Dr. Rueben is also engaged in service to UP and his academic discipline. At UP, he serves on the OSHA Safety Committee and the Senate Ad-Hoc Committee on Collegial Review. He has also served as a CORE 101 Accompanier, and can be seen at Weekends on the Bluff demonstrating his research robots. For his academic discipline, he has organized and chaired workshops on human-robot interaction at leading robotics conferences such as HRI, and is a long-standing reviewer for top venues in the field including HRI, RO-MAN, and the journal Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.

Education

  • Ph.D., Oregon State University (Corvallis, Oregon)
  • B.S., Oregon State University (Corvallis, Oregon) 

Links

Recent Publications

    1. Spagnuolo, R., Hagman, W., Lagerstedt, E., Rueben, M., & Thellman, S. (2026). Making Robot Ecologies Visible: Toward a Taxonomy for Gibsonian Human–Robot Interface Design. In Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 371-375).
    2. Rueben, M., Lee, R., Groechel, T. R., Chen, H., Lee, H., Ragusa, G., & Matarić, M. J. (2026). Multi-week, in-class deployments of telepresence robots with four homebound K-12 students: Benefits, challenges, and recommendations. Education and Information Technologies, 31(8), 2145-2175.
    3. Rueben, M., Rothberg, E., Tang, M., Inzerillo, S., Kshirsagar, S. S., Manchanda, M., Dudley, G., Fraune, M. R., Mataric, M. J. The Robot Olympics: Estimating and Influencing Beliefs About a Robot's Perceptual Capabilities. In Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 1405-1412. IEEE. August, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN53752.2022.9900796
    4. Rueben, M., Horrocks, M. R., Martinez, J. E., Cormier, M. V., LaLone, N. Fraune, M., Toups Dugas, Z. “I See You!”: A Design Framework for Interface Cues about Agent Visual Perception from a Thematic Analysis of Videogames. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 29 - May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517699