Students
Current Students || Ph.D. Alumni || Master's Alumni || Undergraduate Honors Thesis Alumni || Post-Docs
B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, UCLA, 2001
Research Interests: general game playing, machine learning, and robotics
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~kuhlmann ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Greg is a Ph.D. candidate, completing his dissertation on "Automated Domain Analysis for General Game Playing", which explores the benefits of static domain analysis and knowledge transfer to the general game playing problem. In the past, he has been a contributing member to the UT Austin Villa robot soccer team in both the standard platform and simulated coach leagues. Greg is also a Senior Research Scientist at 21st Century Technologies, where he applies intelligent agent techniques to unmanned systems and data mining problems.
B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, 2002
Research Interests: multiagent systems
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~kdresner ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Kurt is finishing his dissertation on Autonomous Intersection Management, the project he helped start in his second year. While finishing up his dissertation, he is employed at Google, where he employs mind-boggling amounts of data to make the World Wide Web a better place. Outside of his academic interests, Kurt enjoys playing the guitar, listening to music, playing board games, and photography.
B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, Brigham Young University, 2002
Research Interests: machine learning, trading agents, e-commerce
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~dpardoe ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
David is writing his dissertation on "Adaptive Trading Agent Strategies Using Market Experience", in which he explores how autonomous agents in market settings can adapt to the behavior of other agents using multiple sources of experience. He has participated in the Trading Agent Competition for seven years and was the leader of teams that won the Supply Chain Management and Ad Auction scenarios. In his free time, David plays the French horn, watches football, and enjoys classic computer/video games.
B.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, 1999
B.S. in Discrete Mathematics and Logic, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, 1999
Research Interests: autonomic computing as pertains to system resource provisioning
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~jwildstr ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Jonathan is working on his dissertation on "Learning Agents for Autonomic Computing: Value Estimation and Hardware Reconfiguration". He is a full time developer for IBM, working on the core kernel of the AIX operating system. His research focus involves learning to autonomously reprovision utility computing systems to maximize the total value, taking into account both the additional value obtained by having extra resources and the cost involved in acquiring and utilizing those resource.
B.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002
Research Interests: reinforcement learning
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~nkj ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Nick is examining the interplay between exploration and generalization in reinforcement learning, in particular the effects of structural assumptions and knowledge. To this end, his research integrates ideas in function approximation, hierarchical decomposition, and model-based learning. He has also worked at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory, applying ideas from reinforcement learning to challenging problems in the field of autonomic computing.
Research Interests: multiagent systems, intelligent robotics, machine learning
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~mazda ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
M.S. in Computer Science, the University of Texas at Austin, 2006
B.S. in Computer Science, Seoul National University, 2000
Research Interests: computer vision, robotics, computer graphics
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~impjdi ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Juhyun's research focuses on real-time computer vision for mobile robots, specifically solving the problem of color constancy for mobile robots using computer graphics simulations. Before joining UTCS, he obtained his B.S. in Computer Science from Seoul National University and worked at Ebay Korea.
B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 2004
Research Interests: reinforcement learning, multiagent systems, humanoid robotics
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~shivaram ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Shivaram is interested in practical applications of reinforcement learning. In particular, he has used robot soccer as a test domain for much of his research, which has resulted in two Best Student Paper awards at RoboCup. During an internship at the Honda Research Institute, Shivaram applied machine learning to the problem of humanoid fall prediction. His other interests include history, literature, cricket, geography, and theatre.
B.S. in Psychology, Texas A&M University, 2003
Research Interests: agents that learn from human teachers
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~bradknox ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Brad, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, is researching how to design agents that can be interactively shaped by a human through signals of positive and negative reinforcement, somewhat like animal training. After giving a lot of demos of a trainable Tetris agent, he keeps getting called "The Tetris Guy". Brad spent the summer of 2008 working as a research intern at NASA Ames where he worked on automatically reconfiguring power systems. In his free time, Brad works in his vegetable garden, rides his Yamaha scooter around town, and tries out his robot training techniques on his puppy.
B.S. in Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, 2005
Research Interests: reinforcement learning and robotics
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~todd ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Todd is a PhD student researching reinforcement learning and robotics, specifically looking at the exploration versus exploitation problem in reinforcement learning and working to apply it to large domains. Before coming to UT, Todd worked in the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabiliation Hospital, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Outside of his research, Todd enjoys ultimate frisbee and foosball and is a dedicated New England Patriots fan.
MS in Computer Science, University of Tulsa, 2007
BE in Computer Science, Bengal Engineering College, India 2003
Research Interests: multiagent learning
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~chakrado ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Doran's research is on agent modeling in multiagent systems. His main interest lies in modeling opponents in multiagent settings such as repeated and sequential games. He also has a parallel interest in model-based reinforcement learning and its overlap with multiagent modeling. He is also a member of the team that won the first Trading Agent Ad Auction competition held at IJCAI, 2009. Between his years in schools, he has worked as a software architect for a couple of years for Sybase and Johnson & Johnson. He is one of the developers of the open source software project perf4j: a statistical logging framework. Outside work, he is a soccer geek and loves following all kinds of soccer leagues around Europe.
B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, 2004
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~neda ]
Neda is a Master's student researching autonomous intersection management (AIM), specifically on a delayed response policy. She has also worked on visualization of AIM using Eco-be! mini robots as well as obstacle avoidance using IR sensors on Sony Aibo robots.
B.S. in Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin, 2009
Research Interests: human-robotic interaction and cognitive science Website: [ www.adamsetapen.com ]
Adam is a Master's student researching human-robotic interaction, specifically investigating ways to exploit the ability of a human to quickly train robots. Adam has interned at TRACLabs, Amazon.com, and the University of Virginia Medical Center. In his free time, he enjoys biking, racquetball, and playing cello and guitar.
"Autonomous Inter-Task Transfer in Reinforcement Learning Domains"
Website: [ teamcore.usc.edu/taylorm ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Job after graduation: Postdoctoral Research Associate with Milind Tambe at The University of Southern California
Currently: same
Matt's Ph.D. dissertation focused on transfer learning, a novel method for speeding up reinforcement learning through knowledge reuse. His dissertation received an honorable mention in the competition for the IFAAMAS-08 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. After UT, Matt moved to The University of Southern California to work with Milind Tambe as a post-doc, pursuing his interests in multi-agent systems.
Representative publications from UT:
"Autonomous Sensor and Action Model Learning for Mobile Robots"
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
"Adaptive Representations for Reinforcement Learning"
Website: [ staff.science.uva.nl/~whiteson ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Job after graduation: Assistant Professor in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam
Currently: same
Shimon's research is primarily focused on single- and multi-agent decision-theoretic planning and learning, especially reinforcement learning, though he is also interested in stochastic optimization methods such as neuroevolution. Current research efforts include comparing disparate approaches to reinforcement learning, developing more rigorous frameworks for empirical evaluations, improving the scalability of multiagent planning, and applying learning methods to traffic management, helicopter control, and data filtering in high energy physics.
Representative publications from UT:
"Robust Structure-Based Autonomous Color Learning on a Mobile Robot"
Website: [ www.cs.ttu.edu/~smohan/ ]
[ First-authored publications from UT ]
Job after graduation: Research Fellow at University of Birmingham (UK) with Jeremy Wyatt, Aaron Sloman and Richard Dearden, on the EU-funded Cognitive Systems (CoSy) project. August 2007 -- October 2008.
Currently: Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas Tech University.
Mohan's Ph.D. dissertation focused on enabling a mobile robot to autonomously plan its actions to learn models of color distributions in its world, and to use the learned models to detect and adapt to illumination changes. His post-doctoral work on using hierarchical POMDPs for visual processing management won a distinguished paper award at ICAPS-08. His current research interests include robot vision, probabilistic planning, statistical learning and multiagent systems.
Representative publications from UT:
- Structure Based Color Learning on a Mobile Robot under Changing Illumination (Autonomous Robots, 2007)
- Color Learning and Illumination Invariance on Mobile Robots: A Survey (Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2009)
"News Mining Agent for Automated Stock Trading"
Job after graduation: Amazon.com
Currently: same
For his Master's thesis, Guru worked with Prof. Peter Stone and Prof. Maytal Tsechansky to study the correlation between stock market movement and internet news stories, using text mining techniques. After graduation, Guru joined Amazon.com. He worked with multiple organizations at Amazon including the world wide supply chain and retail systems. He currently manages the success of sellers on the "WebStore by Amazon" business and is also responsible for Amazon's development center at Phoenix. His team uses data mining to provide customized recommendations to sellers on the Amazon platform. Guru holds multiple patents pending in ecommerce. Prior to joining Amazon, Guru held research intern positions at IIT Delhi, IBM Research Center at Almaden, CA and the University of Joensuu in Finland. Reach him at gurushyam@gmail.com.
"Evolutionary Algorithms in Optimization of Technical Rules for Automated Stock Trading"
Job after UT: Murex, North America Inc.
Currently: MBA Candidate at Kellogg School of Management
Harish worked with Prof. Peter Stone and Prof. Ben Kuipers to study automated stock trading strategies using intelligent combinations of simple, intuitive ``technical'' trading rules. Since he graduated from UT, Harish has worked in the financial software industry, mostly recently at Murex, which develops derivatives trading platforms and risk management software. He is currently pursuing an MBA at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; where his areas of focus are Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Finance. His current interests are in product commercialization and new venture financing. He can be reached at harish.subramanian@gmail.com.
"Exploiting Human Motor Skills for Training Bipedal Robots"
Research Interests: human-robotic interaction and cognitive science Website: [ www.adamsetapen.com ]
Job after graduation: Masters student at UT Austin
Currently: same
Adam is a Master's student researching human-robotic interaction, specifically investigating ways to exploit the ability of a human to quickly train robots. Adam has interned at TRACLabs, Amazon.com, and the University of Virginia Medical Center. In his free time, he enjoys biking, racquetball, and playing cello and guitar.
"Building an Autonomous Ground Traffic System"
Website: [ www.sparkphone.com ]
Job After Graduation: Co-Founder of SparkPhone in Austin, TX
Currently: same
Tarun's undergraduate thesis detailed his contributions to obstacle tracking in UT's entry to the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge and the Autonomous Intersection Management project. He is now working on launching SparkPhone - an application that provides users with 80-90% cheaper international calls versus directly dialing through your carrier. Additionally, unlike VOIP services, SparkPhone does not require that you have a WiFi or data connection when making phone calls because all SparkPhone calls go through the cell network. Over the past year Tarun has built several iPhone apps - one of which (HangTime) was just named by PC World as the dumbest iPhone app of all time.
"Creating a High-Level Control Module for an Autonomous Mobile Robot Operating in an Urban Environment"
Job after graduation: Software/Systems Engineer at USAA in San Antonio, TX
Currently: same
Ryan's undergraduate honors thesis detailed his contribution to UT's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge competition. His work mostly centered on the high-level control and decision-making aspects of an autonomous vehicle as it navigates through city streets. After graduating, Ryan took a position as a software engineer at USAA, where he has designed and implemented significant enhancements to the authentication and content capture components of usaa.com. Even so, his passion for robotics still continues today. Ryan is currently pursuing an MBA in Finance from UTSA.
"An Analysis of the 2005 TAC SCM Finals"
MSc in Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 2008
Website: [ optemo.com/team ]
Job after graduation: Graduate student at University of British Columbia Currently: Co-founder of start-up company "Optemo"
Jan's thesis analyzed the 2005 TAC SCM Finals. This was part of the preparatory work that led the TacTex team to win the 2006 TAC SCM Championship. At UBC Jan became interested in natural language processing and wrote a dissertation titled "Supervised Machine Learning for Email Thread Summarization". Subsequently Jan co-founded a start-up company called Optemo that uses artificial intelligence to assist online shoppers by providing an example-centric product navigation solution.
"Discovering Conditions for Intermediate Reinforcement with Causal Models"
Website: [ www.princeton.edu/~ihwang ]
Currently: Ph.D. Student in Psychology, Princeton University
Irvin's undergraduate honors thesis dealt with accelerating reinforcement learning by automatically applying intermediate reward using causal models. His thesis received the Sun Microsystems Award for Excellence in Computer Sciences/Computer Engineering Research at the University of Texas undergraduate research forum. Irvin is currently studying reinforcement learning as a Ph.D. student in the computational cognitive neuroscience group at Princeton.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Mainz, 2007
Thesis: "Reinforcement Learning with Regularization Networks"
Research Interests: reinforcement learning, machine learning
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~tjung ]
Tobias is interested in optimization and optimal decision-making: in particular how to act optimally when individual decisions have uncertain outcomes and far-reaching consequences. Knowing that his own abilities in this area are rather limited, he focuses his research on how these problems can be solved automatically and computationally. His thesis (nominated for the GI National Dissertation Prize) describes a novel and highly sample efficient online algorithm for reinforcement learning that is specifically aimed at learning in high-dimensional continuous state spaces. Some of his other work includes multivariate time series prediction, sensor evolution and curiosity-driven learning. Currently he is working on localization and filtering algorithms for the DARPA-funded LANdroids project.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, 2008
Research Interests: multiagent systems and artificial intelligent planning
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~chiu ]
Chiu has been working on the Autonomous Intersection Management project since he arrived at UT Austin as a post-doc. Before entering UT Austin, he worked on several research projects in Artificial Intelligence, including automated planning and error detection in multiagent systems. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking and watching movies.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Newcastle, Australia, 2006
Research Interests: legged robotics, autonomous vehicles
Website: [ www.cs.utexas.edu/~mquinlan ]
Michael researches various aspects of robotic systems, including motion, vision and localization. He currently teaches a class on Autonomous Vehicles and competes as part of the Austin Villa team at RoboCup using the Nao humanoid robots. In his spare time he enjoys basketball, cycling, running and soccer.
Ph.D. in Computer Science from UT Austin, 2008
Research Interests: developmental and cognitive robotics, autonomous vehicles, human robot interaction
Website: [ daneel.traclabs.com/~pbeeson/ ]
Job after UT: Senior Scientist at TRACLabs Inc.
Currently: same
Representative publication from UT:
- Multiagent Interactions in Urban Driving. (JoPhA, 2008)
Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, 2006
Research Interests: developmental robotics, human-robot interaction
Website: [ www.cs.arizona.edu/~ianfasel ]
Job after UT: Assistant Research Professor, CS, University of Arizona
Currently: same
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.
Representative publication from UT:
- A Task Specification Language for Bootstrap Learning (AAAI Symposium, 2009)
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Tulane University, 2006
Research Interests: multiagent systems and machine learning
Website: [ www.cs.usm.edu/~banerjee/ ]
Job after UT: Assistant Professor, DigiPen Institute of Technology
Currently: Assistant Professor in The University of Southern Mississippi
As a post-doc, Bikram worked on transfer learning methodology for challenging knowledge transfer tasks, such as general game playing. Currently, he is working on multiple projects funded by NASA and DHS, that exploit multi-agent systems technology to solve problems relating to rocket engine tests and large scale crowd simulation.
Representative publication from UT:
- General Game Learning Using Knowledge Transfer (IJCAI, 2007)