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 ensure that AI systems are well-aligned with human objectives and can be deployed safely in the real world. Toward this goal, we develop efficient learning algorithms that enforce safety constraints, provide performance guarantees, and infer and align human and agent objectives. We work in a wide range of problem settings, from large language models to robotics, drawing from imitation learning, reinforcement learning, AI safety, and human factors.

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



Representative Publications

Alignment, RLHF, and reward inference Reinforcement Learning and Off-Policy Evaluation Pose Estimation and Planning Multimodal Learning