news

Jul, 2024

I’m deeply honored to receive the an Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. I thank my students for nominating me!

Jan, 2024

I was part of a panel on Exploring Professions in & Beyond Academia: A Symposium for Ph.D. Students and Postdocs (Sciences and Engineering Day). It was great to see a packed room full of students interested in research, and the opportunity to share my own experiences and my journey to get to where I am today. Thank you Ziyan Bai for the invitation.

Nov, 2023

I gave an invited talk “What does it mean to be safe for human-robot interactions?” at Virginia Tech Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. Thank you Mazen Farhood for the invitation!

Jun, 2023

I gave an invited talk “Towards Responsibility-Aware Safety for Autonomous Vehicles” at the Intelligent Vehicle Symposium Workshop on Social, interactive and safe behaviors for AVs: benchmarks, models and applications. Thank you for the invitation!

Jun, 2023

I presented my paper Learning Autonomous Vehicle Safety Concepts from Demonstrations at ACC 2023. I presented at an interactive session where I presented a poster.

May, 2023

I gave an invited talk “Towards Responsibility-Aware Safety for Autonomous Vehicles” at the 3rd ACC Workshop on Recent Advancement of Human Autonomy Interaction and Integration. Thank you for the invitation!

Mar, 2023

I recently gave a talk on “Revisiting what it means to be safe for human-robot interactions” at the University of Michigan Controls Conversations with the DASC Lab, and Carnegie Mellon University Tartan Planning Series with the AirLab.

Jan, 2023

Four papers recently accepted to ICRA 2023 and ACC 2023! Learn more about them here.

Sep, 2022

I recently started my Assistant Professor position at the University of Washington! I’ll be directing the Control and Trustworthy Robotics Lab (CTRL) which will subsuming the Autonomous Flight Systems Lab. I’ve just released my new lab website, so please check it out!

Sep, 2022

I’ll be organizing a workshop at NeurIPS 2022, titled Progress and Challenges in Building Trustworthy Embodied AI Deadline to submit a workshop paper has been extended to October 1st!

Jun, 2022

I attended my graduation ceremony and was thrilled to receive the William F. Ballhaus Prize for best PhD Thesis. Thank you everyone that has supported me along the way and made my PhD journey a wonderful experience.

Jun, 2022

I gave an invited talk at the Learning and control for safety-critical systems workshop. Thank you Yagiz Savas for inviting me to speak. I also presented my paper at American Control Conference 2022 at Atlanta, Georgia. It was my first in-person conference since the start of the pandemic, my first time in Atlanta, and my first time co-chairing a session. It was a great conference with great people!

Jun, 2022

I was invited to give a (virtual) talk at the workshop From Benchmarking Behavior Prediction to Socially Compatible Behavior Generation in Autonomous Driving at the Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2022. Thank you Sascha Hornauer for inviting me and organizing the workshop! My collaborator Sever Topan at NVIDIA also presented our joint work titled Interaction-Dynamics-Aware Perception Zones for Obstacle Detection Safety Evaluation that was accepted to the conference.

Mar, 2022

I gave a talk at the Princeton Robotics Seminar about Autonomous Vehicle Safety. Thank you Ani Majumdar for the invite—there were lots of great questions!! My next upcoming talk will at ACC where I will be presenting my paper and also an invited talk at the Learning and Control for Safety-Critical Systems workshop.

Jan, 2022

My paper Semi-Supervised Trajectory-Feedback Controller Synthesis for Signal Temporal Logic Specifications got accepted into American Control Conference 2022!

Dec, 2021

My journal paper Backpropagation through Signal Temporal Logic Specifications: Infusing Logical Structure into Gradient-Based Methods has finally been published to IJRR: Special Invite WAFR2020! It includes a gentle introduction to Signal Temporal Logic and a number of examples to show how you can use STLCG, an implementation of STL that leverages modern automatic differentiation software.

Nov, 2021

I gave a talk for Professor Sylvia Herbert’s Safety for Autonomous Systems special topics class at UCSD. The students asked lots of great questions!

Oct, 2021

I gave a tutorial talk on my STLCG toolbox and was part of the panel discussion at the IROS21 workshop, Transforming Specifications into Robot Programs: A Survey of Formal Methods Tools for Non-Experts. STLCG is based on work I did during my internship at Toyota Research Institute, working with Nikos Arechiga.

Sep, 2021

I started my new role as Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research with the Autonomous Vehicle Research Group.

Jul, 2021

I was featured in Stanford Engineering’s #IAmAnEngineer series. Check out my spotlight!

Jul, 2021

I defended my PhD! You can find a recording of my talk here.

Jul, 2021

New paper on arXiv! This is joint work with Andrea Bajcsy where we advocate for the use of Hamilton Jacobi (HJ) reachability as a unifying mathematical framework for expressing and comparing existing safety concepts used throughout industry and academia.

Mar, 2021

I’m excited to join NVIDIA for an internship in the Autonomous Driving Research group led by Marco Pavone.

Mar, 2021

WAFR2020 finally happened albeit online and in a spotlight talk format. Check out everybody’s spotlight talk including mine.

Mar, 2021

A paper led by Simon Schaefer, Leveraging Neural Network Gradients within Trajectory Optimization for Proactive Human-Robot Interactions has been accepted to ICRA 2021!!!

Feb, 2021

I gave a seminar talk at the University of Washington, Aeronautics and Astronautics department, titled, Towards safe, robust, and trustworthy robot autonomy: Infusing formal methods into learning-enabled autonomy.

Feb, 2021

I gave a talk at UC Berkeley at a joint lab meeting with Prof. Francesco Borrelli, Prof. Ben Recht, and Prof. Koushil Sreenath.

Jan, 2021

I gave a spotlight talk at the NorCal Controls Workshop.

Dec, 2020

I gave a talk at the Autonomous Systems Group at the University of Texas, Austin, titled Safe and trustworthy robot autonomy: Merging formal methods with learning-based techniques.

Nov, 2020

I gave a spotlight talk at the Bay Area Robotics Symposium

Nov, 2020

My paper Multimodal Deep Generative Models for Trajectory Prediction: A Conditional Variational Autoencoder Approach was accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2020.

Nov, 2020

I gave at (virtual) talk titled On Using Reachability Analysis and Temporal Logic for Safe and Robust Planning Under Uncertainty at ETH Zurich Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control Autonomy Talks Seminar.

Jul, 2020

My journal paper On Infusing Reachability-Based Safety Assurance within Planning Frameworks for Human-Robot Vehicle Interactions is now published in the International Journal of Robotics Research.

May, 2020

A paper I co-authored with Jonathan DeCastro at TRI, Interpretable Policies from Formally-Specified Temporal Properties, was accepted to IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Conference 2020.

Apr, 2020

My paper in collaboration with Nikos Arechiga from Toyota Research Institute, Back-propagation through STL Specifications: Infusing Logical Structure into Gradient-Based Methods was accepted to the Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations 2020. (talk).

Mar, 2020

I gave a (virtual) talk titled, On Infusing Logical Reasoning Into Robot Learning at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference, Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems: Modeling and Verification Workshop.

Nov, 2019

I am headed to Stockholm, Sweden for the Future Digileaders Event. I will get to meet other leading female researchers in the broad of field of Digitilization.