Research

Please refer to my Google Scholar page for a complete list of academic publications.

Overview

My subject of interest is robotics and more specifically, the study of how humans and robots collaborate with one another. I approach this problem using concepts from machine learning, robot control, and extended reality (XR).

By studying these concepts, I aspire to develop robots that are capable of assisting people with their everyday tasks. A good example of this is the robotic wheelchair I worked on during my PhD.

Recently, my central focus has been on developing “human-centered” foundation models for robots, pursuing answers to research questions like:

  • How can we collect/source data for robot learning that is uniquely social and collaborative? For example, by ingesting human-to-human data in the pre-training mix.
  • How can we represent and leverage “features” of human data (e.g., intentions, needs, preferences) when training generative robot policies?
  • How can we utilize passive multimodal observations of human behavior for in-context learning? Adapting policies to human feedback signals other than language, such as hand gestures, eye gaze, body posture, etc.
Me wearing an eye tracker on a robotic wheelchair

Selected Publications