Our team

Zhanat Makhataeva is a PhD holder in Robotics Engineering at the School of Engineering and Digital Sciences at Nazarbayev University (NU). She is a senior data scientist at the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) at NU and a member of the Advanced Robotics and Mechatronics Systems (ARMS) Laboratory at NU. She graduated from NU in 2019 with a Degree of Master of Science in Robotics and Mechatronics, and earlier in 2017, did B.Sc. in Robotics at NU.

During her doctoral studies Zhanat became a Microsoft Research PhD Fellow 2021-2022 and had a 12-week Internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge UK Laboratory. She was hosted by the Future Of Work Research Group at Microsoft Research and presented their work at CHI 2023 held in Hamburg, Germany.

In her PhD thesis she presented a novel approach to augmenting human memory using emerging technologies of augmented reality (AR), computer vision (CV), and artificial intelligence (AI). The newly proposed system creates an external representation of object location memory for indoor environments (i.e., objects placed on the three floors of the building) to replace internal mental representations created in the human mind.

This thesis paves the way for the development of AR-based assistive technologies for individuals with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) and cognitive assistive systems capable of decreasing the cognitive load and increasing human performance during tasks that require human spatial object location memory. 

Her research interests  include augmented reality, cognitive assistive systems, artificial intelligence, human memory augmentation, cognitive ergonomics, system test and evaluation, and human information processing concerns.

Currently, she is working on the design and development of Embodied Virtual Agents and their applications in Education.