About Me
I'm a graduate student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I work with professors Dieter Fox and Luke Zettlemoyer in the Robotics and State Estimation lab. Prior to coming to UW, I worked at Cycorp, using the Cyc knowledge base to support machine learning. My primary research interests are in robotics, machine learning, and knowledge representation.
Research Interests
My work focuses on the problem of grounded knowledge acquisition: extracting meaningful representations of human communication, and mapping those representations to the noisy, unpredictable physical world in which robots operate. More specifically, I work on combining probabilistic natural language processing with machine learning to transform human communication into a formal language that a robot can understand and execute. Most recently, we have looked at learning to follow instructions in the navigation field (ISER 2012), and on learning to extend a world model in tandem with learning a language parsing model (ICML 2012).
My research is conducted primarily on the Gambit manipulator arm, which was developed by a collaboration among UW, Intel, and Alium Labs. Our first project was teaching it to play chess robustly in a less than usually constrained environment.
Thanks to those who joined us at AAAI for the Workshop on Grounding Language for Physical Systems!
