I am an Associate Professor and the director of the Safe, Confident, and Aligned Learning + Robotics Lab (SCALAR) in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am also a core member of the interdepartmental UMass robotics group, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

The goal of my research is to enable robots and other learning agents to be deployed in the real world with minimal expert intervention. Toward this goal, we develop efficient learning algorithms that enforce safety constraints, provide performance guarantees, and align human and agent objectives. Thus, our work draws from both machine learning and robotics, including topics such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning, manipulation, and human-robot interaction.

I am a recipient of the of the NSF CAREER Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and the UT Austin CNS Teaching Excellence Award.



Representative Publications

Value Alignment and Reward Inference Safe Reinforcement Learning and Off-Policy Evaluation Pose Estimation and Planning Multimodal Learning