A little about me.

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), working in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. In particular, I am currently exploring the problem space of multi-agent communication for embodied agent populations.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science in 2019 at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology (GT), where I was advised by Dr. Sonia Chernova, director of the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning Lab.  My thesis research lied in the space of Interactive Robot Learning, with a focus on Active Learning. It investigated the problem of enabling an interactive robotic agent with a probabilistic reasoning framework for inferring what queries to make and when to query, given the goal of learning new concepts from a human partner. Part of what made active learning in this context particularly interesting and challenging is the work assumed the setting of a non-stationary physical environment, where external time and budget constraints were being imposed on the agent. The learning scenario was inspired by more realistic human settings, where continual learning should occur and presumably the agent should be able to drive its own learning. 

My broader research interests span the space of autonomous reasoning and decision-making for artificial agents in multi-agent settings. To date, my work has largely focused on models and algorithms for enabling agents to learn through interaction with other agents (human or artificial), trading off cooperative learning objectives with externally imposed constraints.  As my research career evolves, I am very interested in exploring frameworks for reasoning and learning in a more diverse set of multi-agent problem domains.

News.

December 2020: I presented a poster at the NeurIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop [video] and the NeurIPS Zero-Shot Emergent Communication Workshop. [poster]

November 2020: We released an arXiv preprint of our latest work on Zero-Shot Emergent Communication in Embodied Multi-Agent Populations.

November 2020: I was accepted into EECS Rising Stars 2020! Hosted (virtually) by UC Berkeley this year.

October 2020: I gave an Invited Talk in the UMass Amherst Machine Learning and Friends Seminar Series. The topic was Learning through Interaction in Multi-Agent Systems (which can include human agents). [video]

October 2020: I gave a spotlight (lightning) talk at the University of Michigan 2020 AI Symposium.

July 2020: I gave an Invited Talk at the ICML workshop on Human in the Loop Learning. The topic was my thesis work on Active Learning in Realistic Human Settings. [video]

July 2020: I gave the Facebook Sponsor Talk at the ICML Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop. The topic was my newest work on Learning to Communicate Nonverbally for Embodied Agent Populations. [video] ==> more in-depth version of spotlight talk below (given at RSS)

June 2020: Our extended abstract on Emerging Nonverbal Communication Protocols was accepted into the RSS Workshop on Emergent Behaviors in Human-Robot Systems. [spotlight talk — 5 min]

December 2019: I got hooded at the GT doctoral graduation ceremony. I am officially a Doctor of Philosophy.

May 2019: I returned to GT and successfully defended my dissertation! Entitled: Managing Learning Interactions for Collaborative Robot Learning [phd defense talk]

May 2019: Our paper on Active Learning within Constrained Environments got accepted into IJCAI 2019.

April 2019: I started as a postdoc at Facebook AI Research, in Pittsburgh.

February 2019: I was hosted as a guest on the GT School of Interactive Computing Interaction Hour Podcast series, with Professor and Chair Ayanna Howard.

* All paper reference information (and pdfs) listed under Publications tab.