I am currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. I direct the Autonomy & Intelligence Laboratory at Northeastern University.
Prospective Lab Members: Please take a look at this page to see our current openings and express your interest using the relevant form. Unfortunately, I cannot respond to every email. Instead, by entering your info in the correct form, I can take a closer look when I am looking to hire for that position.
My research lies at the intersection of robotics, deep learning, and control theory, with the goal of developing certifiable learning machines. This means creating robots that discover how to do cool behaviors – with guarantees on safety, reliability, and efficiency. Some specific techniques of interest are: reinforcement learning (RL), reachability analysis, learning cost-to-go functions, bridging semantic perception and motion planning, and model predictive control (MPC). A key application area of interest is navigation in challenging environments, such as off-road (e.g., forests, deserts) and alongside humans (e.g., on busy sidewalks, in crowded buildings).
Previously, I was a Visiting Faculty Researcher with Google’s People + AI Research (PAIR) team, developing novel techniques for explainable and trustworthy AI. Before that, I was a Research Scientist and Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, working on the DARPA RACER program, the ARL SARA program, and advancing the field of certifiable learning. I received the PhD (2020), SM (2017), and SB (2015) degrees from MIT in Mechanical Engineering.
Neural Feedback Loop Verification
Socially Aware Motion Planning
High-Speed Off-Road Navigation
Selected Awards
- Winner: Best Student Paper Award (IEEE TC on Aerospace Control, 2023)
- Runner-Up: Best Paper Award (1st Workshop on Formal Verification of Machine Learning, ICML 2022)
- Editors’ Top 5 Published Articles of 2021 (IEEE Access)
- Winner: Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics (IROS 2019)
- Winner: Best Student Paper (IROS 2017)
- Finalist: Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics (IROS 2017)
- Finalist: Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper (ICRA 2017)
- iCampus Student Prize Winner for ofcourse.mit.edu