I am a research scientist at Amazon Alexa in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My research interests are in machine learning, reinforcement learning, planning, and optimization. In 2019, I finished my Ph.D. in computer science in the College of Information and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, advised by Philip Thomas. I completed my M.S. in 2015 at UMass Amherst, and my B.S. at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

• Francisco Garcia, Luoxin Chen, Varun Kumar, He Xie and Jianhua Lu. Industry Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Natural Language Understanding. 2021 North American Chapter of the Association for Computation Linguistics, NAACL. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15871 pdf


• Francisco M. Garcia, Chris Nota, Philip S. Thomas. Learning Reusable Options for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning. 2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.01577 pdf


• Francisco M. Garcia, Philip S. Thomas. A Meta-MDP Approach to Exploration for Lifelong Reinforrcement Learning. 2019, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS. pdf, video


• Francisco M. Garcia, Bruno C. da Silva, Philip Thomas. A Compression-Inspired Framework for Macro Discovery. 2019, Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in Games, AAAI. pdf


• Giguere Stephen, Francisco M. Garcia, Shridar Mahadevan. A Manifold Approach to Learning Mutually Orthogonal Subspaces. 2016, https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02992. pdf


• Kai Ninomiya, Mubbasir Kapadia, Alexander Shoulson, Francisco M. Garcia and Norman I. Badler, Planning Approaches to Constraint-aware Navigation in Dynamic Environments, 2014 Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds pdf


• Francisco M. García, Mubbasir Kapadia and Norman I. Badler, GPU-based Dynamic Search on Adaptive Resolution Grids, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Hong Kong, China pdf, video


• Mubbasir Kapadia, Kai Ninomiya, Alexander Shoulson, Francisco M. García and Norman I. Badler, Constraint Aware Navigation in Dynamic Environments, ACM SIGGRAPH conference on Motion in Games (MIG '13) pdf, video


• Mubbasir Kapadia, Francisco M. García, and Norman I. Badler. Dynamic Search on the GPU. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2013 pdf, video


• Mubbasir Kapadia, Alejandro Porres, Francisco M. García, Vivek Reddy, Nuria Pelechano, and Norman I. Badler. Multi-Domain Real-time Planning in Dynamic Environments. ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium of Computer Animation, 2013 pdf, video


• Shoulson, Alexander, Francisco M. García, Matthew Jones, Robert Mead & Norman I. Badler (2011). “Parameterizing Behavior-Trees”. Jan M. Allbeck & Petros Faloutsos (Eds.). Fourth International Conference on Motion in Games (MIG) pdf