I am a Computer Science PhD Student at Arizona State University and part of the Interactive Robotics Lab lead by Prof. Heni Ben Amor. As part of the lab, I mainly work on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a strong focus on neural networks. Prior to this, I received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Engineering and Computing from the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. During my time in Germany, I was a member of the Humanoid Robotics Group Freiberg under the lead of Prof. Bernhard Jung.

Throughout my academic career, I have worked on bridging the gap between cognition and robotics by using modern approaches to artificial intelligence. More specifically, I’ve implemented natural language processing methodologies to enhance imitation learning. The novelty of my work lies in using language as a natural interface for humans to convey their intention to the robot alongside traditional imitation learning. This allows robots to quickly adapt to new tasks as well as fast transfer learning between different robots with a limited amount of additional training. My recent work on this topic, presented at the Southwest Robotics Symposium 2019, was awarded the best poster award by NVIDIA.