People

Daniel Brown

I'm an assistant professor in the Kahlert School of Computing and the Robotics Center at the University of Utah. I completed my postdoc at UC Berkeley in 2022 and received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UT Austin in 2020. My research broadly focuses on human-centered AI and human-AI alignment. My goal is to develop robots and other AI systems that can safely and efficiently interact with, learn from, teach, and empower human users. My lab's research spans the areas of human-robot interaction, reward and preference learning, human-in-the-loop machine learning, and AI safety. I am interested in applications in assistive, rehab, and surgical robotics, personal AI assistants, swarm robotics, and autonomous driving.

Connor Mattson

I am a second year Ph.D. Robotics Student in the Robotics Center and Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. My primary research interests are Human-Robot Interaction, Multi-Agent RLHF, and Swarm Robotics. Currently I'm researching how machine learning can help humans understand what their robots are capable of, how we can efficiently leverage human input to teach multi-robot systems how to perform tasks, and how to share control of high-DoF robots between human teleoperators and AI. After my Ph.D., I plan to continue my research in a tenure-track faculty position at a research-focused university.

Eric Brewer

I’m generally interested in learning algorithms, i.e., reinforcement learning, especially regarding perception.

Zohre Karimi

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Robotics at the Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah supervised by Dr. Daniel Brown. My research centers on Human-Robot Interaction and Surgical Robotics. To be more specific I am working on developing advanced reward learning techniques and imitation learning algorithms to enhance the capabilities of autonomous systems in surgical robotics. By integrating machine learning with robotics, I aim to improve precision, safety, and efficiency in robotic-assisted surgeries. In addition to this, I am engaged in projects exploring shared control between robots and humans, aiming to enhance collaborative interactions across various domains.

Atharv Belsare

I am a first year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Kahlert School of Computing. My research interests include Human-Robot Interaction and Assistive Robotics.

Zifan Wu

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. My primary research focus is on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Specifically, I've been investigating methods to improve the sample efficiency and safety of DRL algorithms. To that end, I delve into fields such as model-based RL, offline RL, constrained RL, and also representation learning. Currently I'm interested in studying the relationship between the data distribution shift during policy learning and the plasticity loss in the policy network (inability to adapt to unseen data distributions).