
Hello there!
I am currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and a core faculty member of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) at Georgia Tech.
I direct the Structured Techniques for Algorithmic Robotics (STAR) Lab.
[CV]
Quick Plugs:
Recruiting: If you are interested in joining our lab, I request that you take the time to read my research statement and some of my papers to get a sense of my research interests before reaching out to me. You can also view a short talk that provides a high-level overview of my work (see below). In your email, please share what specific areas or research questions excite you and why you think we would make a good team!
Teaching: I am teaching a graduate-level course on Multi-Agent Systems (CS 7631) in Fall 2022.
LfD Survey: Our review of recent advances in robot LfD (in collaboration with EPFL) has been published in the Annual Review of Control, Robotics and Autonomous Systems. [eprint]
What I do:
I spend most of my time trying to trick people (and sometimes myself!) into thinking robots are smart and collaborative. To aid this illusion, my students and I study the areas of robot learning, human-robot interaction, and multi-agent coordination. My research develops algorithmic techniques that help collaborative robots learn to reliably operate in complex environments, while leveraging and enhancing their interactions with humans.
P.S.: If you are anything like me, you might like the fact that control the playback speed (three dots on the bottom right).
My background:
Before I started as an Assistant Professor in 2021, I worked with with Sonia Chernova as a Postdoctoral Fellow (and later a Research Scientist) at Georgia Tech. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut (UConn) in 2018, where I worked with Ashwin Dani and was a Graduate Fellow of the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (UTC-IASE). As part of my dissertation, I developed computational methods for (i) learning robot movement primitives from demonstrations with strong theoretical guarantees, and (ii) probabilistic inference of the intentions of human partners during close-proximity physical collaboration. I received my M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida in 2014, and my B.E. in Instrumentation and Control Engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India in 2012.