Simon Stepputtis

About

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Katia Sycara in the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab. In my research, I aim to create intelligent robots and AI systems that are capable of seamlessly integrating with human environments and tasks. To this end, I develop neuro-symbolic methods that reason over the attributes and affordances of objects in the environment, allowing them to learn behaviors efficiently and adapt to new environments. I earned my Ph.D. from Arizona State University under Prof. Heni Ben Amor in the Interactive Robotics Lab, where I specialized in physical human-robot interaction. I’ve also collaborated on projects with Bosch and X, The Moonshot Factory. My work has been featured at top venues such as NeurIPS and Autonomous Robots, earning spotlight presentations and the Best Poster Award at the Southwest Robotics Symposium.

I am on the faculty market for 2024/2025! Please do not hesitate to reach out.

Experience

  • Postdoctoral Fellow (2022 - now)

  • Resident @ Google X (Summer 2021)

    • X, The Moonshot Factory
    • As a resident, I worked on industrial manipulation tasks for Intrinsic, a robotics software and AI project at Google X.

  • Robotics Intern (Summer 2018)

    • Robert Bosch LLC
    • During my interhsip, I segmented time series data into semantic sections and validated user behaviors based on usage patterns and global goal constraints.

  • Graduate Service Assistant (2017 - 2021)

    • Arizona State University
    • During my Ph.D., I worked as a teaching and research assistant on various occasions in the Interactive Robotics Lab led by Dr. Heni Ben Amor.

Education

  • Ph.D. Computer Science (2017 - 2021)

    • Arizona State University, USA
    • Thesis: Multimodal Robot Learning for Grasping and Manipulation

  • M.Sc. Engineering & Computing (2015 - 2016)

    • Technische Universität Freiberg, Germany
    • Thesis: A data-driven approach for triadic interactions in human-robot interaction

  • B.Sc. Engineering & Computing (2011 - 2015)

    • Technische Universität Freiberg, Germany
    • Thesis: Upper body tracking for avatar visualization in HMD-based virtual reality