Welcome to my home page. I am an assistant professor in the Computer
Science Department at Brown University.
The aim of my research program is to construct robots that seamlessly
use natural language to communicate with humans. In twenty years,
every home will have a personal robot which can perform tasks such as
clearing the
dinner table, doing laundry,
and preparing
dinner. As these machines become more powerful and more
autonomous, it is critical to develop methods for enabling people to
tell them what to do. Robots that can communicate with people using
language can respond
appropriately to commands given by humans, ask questions when they are
confused, and request help
when they get stuck. We apply probabilistic methods, corpus-based
training, and decision theory to develop interactive robotic systems
that can understand and generate natural language.
I completed my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in 2010, where I developed
models for the meanings of spatial prepositions and motion verbs. My
postdoctoral work at MIT CSAIL focused on creating robots that
understand natural language. I have published at SIGIR, HRI, RSS,
AAAI, IROS, and ICMI, winning Best Student Paper at SIGIR and ICMI. I
was named one of IEEE Spectrum’s AI’s 10 to Watch and won the Richard
B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University.
Here is our language-understanding system running on a forklift:
Direction-understanding on a robotic helicopter:
Direction-understanding for the PR2:
I am also interested in reinforcement learning as applied to
“human-cat communication”:projects/gizmo.html: