I am an Assistant Professor and the director of the Personal Autonomous Robotics Lab (PeARL) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. I am also a core faculty member in the interdepartmental robotics group here at UT.
The goal of my research is to enable personal robots to be deployed in the home and workplace with minimal intervention by robotics experts. In settings such as these, robots do not operate in isolation, but have continual interactions with people and objects in the world. With this in mind, we focus on developing algorithms to solve problems that robot learners encounter in real-world interactive settings. Thus, our work draws roughly equally from both machine learning and robotics, including topics such as learning from demonstration, manipulation, human-robot interaction, interactive perception, and reinforcement learning.
Prior to joining UT Austin, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, working with Chris Atkeson. I received my PhD in September 2013 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, working under the supervision of Andrew Barto.
