Hello there
Welcome to my home page. I'm a
postdoc at the
Learning and Intelligent Systems
group at MIT CSAIL, working
with Professors Leslie Pack
Kaelbling and Tomas
Lozano-Perez.
I recently completed my PhD at the
Autonomous Learning Laboratory
at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst under the supervision of Professor Andy Barto.
My research focuses on
building intelligent, autonomous robots that
display open-ended learning
and broad competence. To this end
I work on methods for
creating robots that can acquire
general purpose skill hierarchies through interaction with
their environments, and thereby
become able to solve harder and harder control problems over time.
More details are available on my research,
publications, and thesis pages.
Recent News:
- I am giving an invited talk at
the
Workshop on
Machine Learning for Interactive Systems: Bridging the Gap between Perception, Action and Communication
in Beijing, China, August 3rd-5th 2013.
- I am co-organizing the
AAAI 2013 Workshop on Intelligent Robotic
Systems in Bellevue, Washington, 14th-15th July 2013.
- I am co-organizing the
RSS Workshop on
Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics in Berlin, Germany
on June 27th and 28th, 2013.
- I gave an invited talk at the EUCogIII Members Conference
in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, April 10th 2013.
- I co-organized the AAAI Spring Symposium
on Designing Intelligent
Robots: Reintegrating AI II at Stanford University, March 25th-27th
2013.
- I co-organized the Northeast
Robotics Colloquium with Stefanie Tellex,
Matt Walter, and
Brian Scassellati.
- I am very excited to be collaborating with the newly-formed
AIML Group
at the University of the
Witwatersrand.
- I co-organized the AAAI Spring Symposium
on Designing Intelligent
Robots: Reintegrating AI at Stanford University, March 26th-28th
2012.
- Ulrich Paquet, Dylan Shell
and I recently launched za-cs.net:
the
South African Computer Science network as a way to bring together
South African CS researchers, wherever they happen to currently live.
The site includes a forum and
a
wiki-fied version of my
old guide
for South African students interested in going overseas
for a postgraduate degree in Computer Science.
- Scott Kuindersma and
I won Best Student Video at
the
2011 AAAI Video
Competition for our video Autonomous Robot
Skill Acquisition.
- I have completed my thesis (!), graduated (!!), and moved to the Learning
and Intelligent Systems Group
at MIT CSAIL as a postdoc, as of
January 2011.
- I took some photos of the
talks and attendees at the
Multidisciplinary Symposium on
Reinforcement
Learning that was held after ICML in June 2009 in Montreal,
Canada.
-
Özgür Şimşek
and I organized a workshop on
abstraction in
reinforcement learning at
ICML/UAI/COLT 2009 to encourage research
that combines both state and temporal abstractions (skills).
- Gdk.
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