About

Goals

I have a few serious goals that I think about pretty much constantly:

  • Make useful, reliable
  • Enable robots to work anywhere
  • Scale robots as far as possible

Industry Experience

I'm currently serving as a robotics engineer at Boston Dynamics.

I've worked at a few software companies in the past, before focusing on robotics research in academia for a few years:

Google -- I worked on the Cloud Rollouts team for a summer, where I built a system for Kubernetes rollout management using Go.

Clinc AI -- I worked on the Core AI team for 8 months, where I worked on two projects building capabilities for conversational AI. The first was a system using attention-based deep learning models for extracting relationships between entities in a dialog system. The second was a system for automatically gathering and cleaning training data for conversational AI tasks.

Academic Experience

Prior to industry, my robotics experience came from academia. I worked in a few labs at the University of Michigan:

ROAHM Lab -- I spent a year in this lab focused on building legged locomotion systems for the Digit robot.

Progress Lab -- I spent two years in this lab mostly focused on mobile manipulation for the Digit robot, but also working on various other research efforts in perception.

SLED Lab -- I was involved in this lab for three years, working on embodied AI and natural language projects. My time here culminated in the Amazon Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge, in which we won first place!

Other efforts in school

  • During the first semester of my Master's degree, I founded the Reinforcement Learning Reading Group and served as its lead coordinator for two years.
  • During the last two years of undergrad, I served as the President of the Michigan Student Artificial Intelligence Lab.
  • I was a Graduate Student Instructor for the Computer Vision course (EECS 442) at Michigan for a year. During undergrad I also served as an Instructional Aide for the Conversational AI course (EECS 498).

Recent awards

  • First Place in the 2023 Amazon Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge
  • Best Paper Award in Mobile Manipulation at IROS 2021

Background

I've been actively working on AI and robotics since I was 15 years old. I started while attending the Bronx High School of Science in NYC, where I programmed for our school's FIRST Robotics team and simultaneously did award-winning research on using natural language processing for clinical decision support.

After high school I attended the University of Michigan to study computer science. During my first year there I continued working on AI for medical applications. In my second and third years I slowly pivoted over to natural language processing, when I spent most of 2019 working at Clinc, a local AI startup in Ann Arbor focused on building for enterprise. In 2020, I joined the SLED group, which focuses on language, especially in the context of embodied AI (e.g. robots).

That's around the time when I fell in love with robots all over again. Since then I continued into a Master's degree in Robotics at Michigan as well, doing mobile manipulation and perception research in the Progress Lab. I also worked on planning and control for humanoid locomotion in the ROAHM Lab. I had a great time, and I think I'm going to be working on robots for a very long time. I'm fortunate to now be in industry tackling the goals I listed above, and I'll do what it takes until they're accomplished.