6 years ago, we flew to ATL to start the next chapter of our lives. I started as faculty at
@gtcomputing
, found PhD students who were willing to take a chance on me 🙏, took risks on exciting research. Today, I’m excited to share that I’ve been promoted to Assoc Prof w/ Tenure!!!
I won the NSF CAREER award!!! I’ll be honest, this was my 3rd and final try: it was a journey. I couldn’t have succeeded w/o my amazing students in the
@core_robotics
lab, the mentorship of Prof Sonia Chernova,
@mark_riedl
, & the community in
@GTrobotics
+
@gtcomputing
. 🙏
Could robots be the standard of care for older adults?
@MatthewGombolay
believes so. He's received the
@NSF
CAREER Award, which will fund research to collect the largest data set ever on how older adults interact with robots.
@gtcomputing
@GTrobotics
Many amazing ML/Robotics PhDs I've mentored have come from non-CS backgrounds. It can be scary at first, so I started summer bootcamps: I give a chalk talk & students take turns writing a blog & creating a coding PSet. The first 4 blogs are now online!
Excited that our ML/AI review is now available
@pedneurojournal
Available for a limited time (50 days):
Includes:
-History of ML/AI
-Definitions within ML/AI
-Approach to using ML/AI
-Applications within child neurology
@ChildNeuroSoc
@ReverendWarnock
“You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Psalm 139
Woot -- I just got my first
@NSF
medium on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for a collaboration with PI Panagiotis Tsiotras and Co-PI Sam Coogan. I am excited to be a Co-PI with these great partners and am looking forward to get started! More details to come.
Congrats to my sister on becoming Dr. Alli Gombolay! It was a privilege to get to hood her to this morning — I was filling in for her advisor who was out of the country! Next stop: Hogwarts.
@gtcomputing
@ICatGT
Nervous for your PhD Thesis Proposal? We prepared this blog for you on the 15 things proposed often miss when preparing for the before, during, and after the presentation. A🧵1/n …
Congrats Dr.
@mariah17schrum
on successfully defending your PhD dissertation today! It’s been amazing to see the depth and breadth of all you’ve done in ML, Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction since you helped me found the
@core_robotics
lab just over 4 yrs ago.
Congratulations
@EsiSeraj
and
@mariah17schrum
on all of your amazing achievements here at Georgia Tech in
@GTrobotics
. Thank you for helping me to found the
@core_robotics
in 2018. I am tremendously proud of you and can’t wait to see all you accomplish in the years to come.
.
@CNN
invited me to talk about the serious ethical and technical issues with facial recognition tech police are using today and arresting the wrong people! These issues are exacerbated by race and gender. 🙏 to
@RosalesReport
for her excellent reporting.
"Interpretable Machine Learning: Neural Networks and Differentiable Decision Trees" -- Check out this awesome blog post by our very own
@andrewsilva9
on his recent work bringing interpretability to reinforcement learning.
@core_robotics
@mlatgt
Announcing Dr. Laura Strickland! Laura is my first PhD student to defend, and it was a treat to do my first hooding. Laura flew back for graduation having already started a position
@SandiaLabs
-- congrats Laura!
@core_robotics
@gtcomputing
@GTrobotics
PhD applications are being accepted to join the
@core_robotics
! We have a diverse lab seeking are changing the world of robotics of humans for the better :) Interests include computational HRI, Robotics, ML, and cognition. Apply to
@gtcomputing
!
We push the idea that collaborative robots will make the world a better place…but are we narrow minded in our worldview? Yeah…we probably are. A 🧵on what people are willing to give up to maintain even superficial human-human connection. 1/
What can table tennis teach us about fast-pace, close-up human-robot interaction? Turns out, a lot! Thanks to
@gtcomputing
and
@GTrobotics
for this cool write-up on our latest research coming out at
@HRI_Conference
by Kin Man Lee, Arjun Krishna, et al.
Congratulations to Dr. Erin Botti from
@core_robotics
on her successful PhD defense yesterday on "Improving Learning from Demonstration in Real-World Scenarios!" Check out her award-winning papers here:
Congrats to newly-minted Dr.
@andrewsilva9
! Andrew helped me found the
@core_robotics
, and his transformative research has contributed to interactive ML, explainable AI, federated learning, bias in ML, LLMs, and human-robot interaction! He has also forged strong research
Robots in homes, driving on streets, and on tennis courts will need to predict paths of dynamic objects. We develop a factor graph method outperforming an AEKF to quickly predict where the ball will go by watching player’s swing and 🎾. ICRA’24 Preprint:
Most Important Equations: The variational lowerbound for conditional mutual information is one of the most important equations I’ve ever learned. This lowerbound undergirded our lab’s
@HRI_Conference
best paper as well as papers at
@NeurIPSConf
and
@corl_conf
. A 🧵…1/4
The
@CoreRoboticslab
at
#IROS2023
had 3 paper presentations, 1 demo, + 1 workshop organized. Kudos to my amazing students for being tremendous ambassadors of our work. Thanks also
@gtcomputing
for putting together this sweet site highlighting the impact:
I am thrilled to be local co-chair with
@Evo_Daveo
and see everything come together. This will be the largest CORL ever at > 800 attendees. Amazing! Thanks to Sonia Chernova and everyone on the organizing committee as well as all of you coming to participate!
@GTrobotics
Gearing up for the conference next week, check this interactive feature as you prep for your time at the conference. Discover cool papers and insights.
Did you know that we have 199 contributed papers from 873 authors originating in 25 countries! 🤯
Live demo at
@GTrobotics
IRIM Showcase of a robot slipping on a poster stand and recovering! Do you think the students risked their professor’s robot on purpose?
If you are a BS or MS student applying for PhD positions this fall, consider the
@core_robotics
. We don’t just do awesome robot stuff, we also know how to have fun. We just completed our first escape room! Thanks
@TimetoEscapeATL
for the adventure!
@GTrobotics
1/ ChatGPT is an impressive parlor trick, but it is not something that we should view as intelligent (i.e., able to reason able novel problems). Others have “broken” ChatGPT, but I wanted to see it for myself. A 🧵 …
Congrats to my PhD student,
@andrewsilva9
for being named a 2021
@Apple
Scholar! The award comes with multiple years of funding to support Andrew’s dissertation work in interactive machine learning!
@core_robotics
@gtcomputing
Congratulations to ML
@GT
Ph.D. students
@joannetruong
and
@andrewsilva9
on being named 2021 Apple Scholars. Truong and Silva are members of the program’s second cohort and are the first Georgia Tech students to be awarded the scholarships.
New website! Check out my first website () since I was a graduate student. Thanks to all my amazing
@core_robotics
members past and present who have helped me explore the exciting worlds of robotics and machine learning.
@GTrobotics
@gtcomputing
Woot woot! We are the lead site for the new NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING). Strong leadership by Prof. Sonia Chernova and so many others at
@gtcomputing
and
@SCSatCMU
!
The
@core_robotics
representing our Human-Robot Interaction work at the
@GTrobotics
IRIM Industry Day! Here we have
@mariah17schrum
, Nina Moorman, and Erin Botti sharing their research:
Dear
@corl_conf
2023 attendees, David D’Ambrosio (Google) and I are your local arrangements co-chairs. Today we are taste testing the menu for the conference! Delicious! Thanks Starling Hotel!
@GTrobotics
Always a distinct pleasure to catch up with and hear from
@MatthewGombolay
, this time at
#RLDM2022
! We’ve come a long way from our shared time at
@MITLL
Can Diffusion Models help robots predict agent behavior (a problem in autonomous vehicles (AVs) to narcotics interdiction)? Yes!
@Seancye
shared his pioneering work
@MultiRobotSys
in what may revolutionize imitation learning, IRL, LfD, etc. A🧵1/n
Paper:
Congratulations Dr.
@EsiSeraj
on successfully defending your thesis on “Enhancing Teamwork in Multi-robot Systems!” Esi’s work ranges from distributed controls to reinforcement learning to human-robot interaction. Impressive representing the
@core_robotics
!
#AI
is capturing the public’s imagination, but who’s inventing this next wave of tech?
@GeorgiaTech
experts in two
#AI
fields will share their latest findings internationally next week. Explore Now!
Robotics:
Computer Vision:
The job market sucks right now for robotics PhDs. I'm hearing many stories of PhD students with offers at
#FAANG
getting fired having just started and even having offers rescinded. Q: Are universities producing too many PhDs?
@JohnsHopkins
thinks so:
I’ll be speaking at the
#RLCONFORM
workshop at 9:30 AM in Room 320 at
#IROS2023
on Interactive and Interpretable Reinforcement Learning. Come check it out!
"HRI for Aging in Place" will officially be a workshop at
@HRI_Conference
in March 2024! I'm excited to work with Nina Moorman (GT), Michelle Zhao (CMU),
@hadmoni
, and Reid Simmons (CMU)! This workshop is inspired by our work w/
@AICARING
for helping people age with autonomy.
Congrats to my students,
@rohanpaleja27
and
@andrewsilva9
, on their paper “Interpretable and Personalized Apprenticeship Scheduling: Learning Interpretable Scheduling Policies from Heterogeneous User Demonstrations” being accepted to NeurIPS’20!
@core_robotics
@ICatGT
Your search for a practice partner will never end in vain, should
@gtcomputing
professor of robotics Matthew Gombolay have his way.
Meet ESTHER, a new tennis-playing robot named in honor of
@EstherVergeer
.
Healthcare will be revolutionized by AI. Researchers have been developing explainable AI (xAI) for doctors to know the *why* behind an AI's reasoning to mitigate over-trust. Yet, our research w/ neurologists shows xAI can *degrade* decision-making. A🧵 1/
The
@HRIPioneers
class of 2023 will include our very own Erin Hedlund-Botti (pictured left)
@core_robotics
@GTrobotics
. She will present “Investigating Learning from Demonstration in Imperfect and Real World Scenarios.” Her work is sponsored by the
@NSF
AI-CARING Institute.
So excited to see amazing work of my PhD student
@mariah17schrum
highlighted by
@gtcomputing
. I hope one day her research could save lives when aircraft experience in-flight mechanical emergencies.
@core_robotics
A new autonomous flight model forecasts how a commercial plane might fare in an emergency and can make high-risk maneuvers and then return to a safe trajectory. It could one day help pilots who can’t react as quickly when lives are at stake.
#ICRA2020
Grand Challenges in Human-Robot Teaming! Check out our review article in on the 9 key challenges we are most excited about that need to be addressed for robots to be our teammates in the workplace and in the home. Link:
@GTrobotics
@MITLL
Congrats to my student
@EsiSeraj
for being a finalist for best student paper award for ACC’20! His paper on multi-robot coordination for wildfire fighting will be presented this summer.
@GTrobotics
@gtcomputing
My ACC’20 paper got selected among the top 5 finalists for best student paper award.. a perfect valentine’s day gift 😄
Shoutout to my amazing advisor
@MatthewGombolay
for his support!
PaperTitle: Coordinated Control of UAVs for Human-Centered Active Sensing of Wildfires
#ACC20
Code Release!
@chen_letian
just released the code from our
@corl_conf
2020 Best Paper Nomination on Learning from Suboptimal Demonstration! Check out the codebase () along with this awesome video on the work from
@gtcomputing
()
Happening today! It’s not too late to register for Robotics for People (R4P) at
@rssconf
2021. My fellow general chair, Shreyas Kousik, and the entire organizing committee have put together a great workshop including a debate:
@DorsaSadigh
,
@chelseabfinn
,
@guyhoffman
, and
@cmat
!
1/ YKTFW one of your amazing students solves a problem you’ve dreamt about ever since your dissertation? That just happened to me! Here’s a short story…
@gtcomputing
Our new meta-learning in active learning technique allows us to safely and efficiently optimize deep brain stimulation and fly a damaged UAV. Check out our now IEEE RA-L publication to be presented by
@mariah17schrum
at IROS later this year!
@GTrobotics
One of my favorite feelings at the start of a semester is the satisfaction of scheduling individual advising, team, and
@core_robotics
meetings. For a moment, I can enjoy thinking of all the synergies and cross-pollination and flow that we’ll achieve…Invariably chaos ensues 😂
"Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error" read a headline in
@latimes
on 10/1/99. As a prof. teaching
@gtcomputing
undergrads on sensors & converting units, I started using this Ex. However, it dawned on me mid-spiel...NONE of the 320 of 'em were alive in '99...except for 1...
Dieter Fox will share his work with us during his
@GTrobotics
seminar one week from today! Excited to be co-hosting him with
@zsoltkira
and
@sethahutchinson
. If you’re in the Atlanta area, come check out Dieter’s amazing work in robotics!
Think police use of facial recognition is bad? Police are using DNA at crime scenes and ML to predict what your face looks like and run that through facial recognition databases. This is Orwell and Minority Report. We need to shut this down.
@ACLU
I enjoyed my day delivering an invited talk at
@MITLL
#RAAINS
on how “The DoD is Doing it Wrong” in understanding human-machine teaming.
@MITLL
helped me launch my faculty career during my “postdoc” with them and am grateful for their friendship in supporting the DoD. 🙏
Honored to receive this award! Thank you to all of the students in CS 4649/7649 who helped me to grow as a teacher — especially during the pandemic!
@gtcomputing
Nine ML
@GT
faculty members were honored with an award for teaching excellence. Congrats Siva Theja Maguluri, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Matthieu Bloch,
@MatthewGombolay
,
@swati1729
, Jake Abernethy, Kishore Ramachandran,
@ShihaoYangPhD
, and Cassie Mitchell!
As a rockstar PhD student, Mariah won a best paper award at
@HRI_Conference
and 3 poster competitions with prize money and got to travel to Middle Earth (NZ) to present her seminal work on “Robots Teaching Humans to Teach Robots”
@corl_conf
.
Congrats to
@sannevanwaveren
for being selected as an EECS rising star at GaTech!
@gtcomputing
. Check out Sanne's recent work in human-drone interaction and safety at with
@aiolandaleite
and collaborators!
Paper:
EECS Rising Star:
What do you do when you want to teach a robot a skill (like hitting a tennis ball) but aren’t an expert? That’s ok!
@chen_letian
is giving a plenary talk
#CoRL2020
tomorrow on how robots can learn from suboptimal demonstration to perform better than the human teacher!
@mlatgt
It was a privilege to work with the
@GT_EPIC_Lab
using deep learning to help hip exoskeletons work for everyone without person-specific tuning. Impressed with
@dean_molinaro
@inseungkang
@jcamargo_co
and all Aaron Young is doing to improve this tech.
Winners from the
@HRI_2021
Elevator Pitch Competition have been announced! Congrats to Rachael Burns (Max Planck Inst.) for 1st place overall and grad student runners-up Taylor Faulkner (UT Austin) and
@SayantaniDutta9
. Announcement:
Congratulations to Yaru Niu and
@rohanpaleja27
in the
@core_robotics
for their best workshop paper award on “MAGIC: Multi-Agent Graph-Attention Communication” at the MAIR2 Workshop
@ICCV_2021
!!!
Strong work!
Link:
Want to teach a robot a skill, like playing ping pong, but you aren’t an expert? No problem!
@gtcomputing
put together this awesome article describing our
@corl_conf
best paper nomination for robots learning from imperfect human teachers!
@core_robotics
It was a treat to be invited by
@rohanchandra30
to speak at the
#RSS2023
workshop on Multi-agent planning and navigation in challenging environments. I share our work in the
@CoreRobotics
lab modeling humans in coordinating human-robot teams. Here are some of our relevant papers:
#RSS2023
Multi agent planning and navigation in challenging environments is one of the big open problems in robotics.
Near full room in workshop today thanks to amazing speakers. Recording will be made online.
Congrats Manisha Natarajan on your PhD thesis proposal on “Methods and Models for Robots to Support Variable Human Task Performance.” A preliminary version of her upcoming 2024 AAMAS paper won a best paper nomination
@RealAAAI
Fall Symposium Series. Link:
NeurIPS'22 is just 1 mo. away and can't wait to attend and speak @ Workshop on Progress & Challenges in Building Trustworthy Embodied AI () organized by amazing researchers, e.g. Chen Tang,
@leilanigilpin
,
@JiachenLi8
, and Prof. Changliu Liu + Karen Leung.
Congratulations to Mariah
@mariah17schrum
, Erin Hedlund, and Nina Moorman for winning best poster at IRIM’s Spring 2022 Robotics Research Showcase for their work on MIND MELD: Personalized Meta-Learning for Robot-Centric Imitation Learning!
Come check out my talk on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Leaning tomorrow! Link to the virtual seminar is available in the 🧵 I’m retweeting! I appreciate to
@EugeneVinitsky
for reaching out and organizing.
@core_robotics
@GTrobotics
Check out our
#CoRL2022
paper on ‘Contrastive Decision Transformers’ (ConDT), an efficient solution for offline RL w/ successful application to robot learning! Excited to represent
@core_robotics
here at
@corl_conf
in the beautiful Auckland. (1/7)
Link:
xAI has pros/cons: what form of xAI (e.g., decision tree, saliency) helps a user factually understand an AI may not be the kind of xAI the user wants.
@andrewsilva9
just presented
@HRI_Conference
on how AI can balance trade-offs. Paper:
The
@CoreRoboticslab
at
#IROS2023
had 3 paper presentations, 1 demo, + 1 workshop organized. Kudos to my amazing students for being tremendous ambassadors of our work. Thanks also
@gtcomputing
for putting together this sweet site highlighting the impact: