Nadia Figueroa

I am a senior PhD student at EPFL, where I am advised by Prof. Aude Billard in the LASA lab. My research has been funded by the European Union Commission through the FP7 project Robohow and the H2020 project Cogimon. Prior to my PhD studies, I spent time at the DLR's (German Aerospace Center) Robotics and Mechatronics Institute and at NYU Abu Dhabi. I obtained my bachelor's from Monterrey Tech and master's from TU Dortmund.

The main goal of my research is to endow robots with the capabilities of learning, aiding and smoothly interacting with humans in unstructured and complicated tasks, from household activities such as cooking and cleaning to difficult industrial tasks such as assemblies, carrying/lifting large objects, etc. In order to achieve this goal, I focus on leveraging machine learning techniques with concepts from dynamical systems theory to solve salient problems in the areas of learning from demonstration, incremental/interactive learning, human-robot collaboration, multi-robot coordination, shared autonomy and control.

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• [June 2019] I successfully defended by PhD thesis entitled: "From High-Level to Low-Level Robot Learning of Complex Tasks: Leveraging Priors, Metrics and Dynamical Systems" under the supervision of Prof. Aude Billard (EPFL).
-> The president of the jury was Prof. Jamie Paik (EPFL), the internal examinar was Prof. Melanie Zeilinger (ETH) and external examiners were Prof. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker (MPI) and Prof. Julie A. Shah (MIT). The jury nominated my thesis for the Doctoral Program distinction and for the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Ltd. Award .
• [May 2019] At ICRA 2019 I will be giving a tutorial on "Dynamical System-based Learning from Demonstration". Together with my advisor and colleagues we will present the DS-learning methods developed in the lab and how to use them for different applications.

• In December 2018, I gave a 30min talk at the SwissAI Machine Learning meetup at EPFL
• In November 2018, I gave a 12min talk at the Swiss Machine Learning Day (SMLD) at EPFL
• At Corl 2018, I gave a 4min spotlight presentation for my accepted paper.
• In August 2018, I gave a 45min Research Seminar at UT Austin, Texas
• In July 2018, I gave two lectures (lecture 1, lecture 2) + exercise session at the Tutorial on Dynamical system-based Learning from Demonstration at EPFL, which I co-organized / website
• At ICRA 2018, I gave a 12min talk at the Workshop in Machine Learning in the Planning and Control of Robot Motion / website
• At ICRA 2018, I gave a 12min talk at the Workshop on Cognitive Whole-Body Control for Compliant Robot Manipulation / website
• ...

• In April 2017, our team (me + Sina Mirrazavi + Aude Billard) was selected as one of the Top 5 finalists in the KUKA Innovation Award / spotlight video
• At RSS 2016, we won (together with Sina Mirrazavi) the Best Student Paper award and were nominated for Best Conference Paper and Best Systems Paper.
• In 2016, I was selected as a Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer for the HRI Pioneers workshop which identifies and empowers the world’s top student researchers early in their careers.

Throughout my PhD I've been a teaching assistant for the following graduate courses:
MICRO-401 Machine Learning Programming (Fall 2016/Fall 2017)
Head Teaching Assistant and Main Syllabus Architect and Developer.
MICRO-570 Advanced Machine Learning (Spring 2016/2017)
Head Teaching Assistant and Tutorial Developer.
MICRO-455 Applied Machine Learning (Fall 2015)
Teaching Assistant.
Co-developer of ML_toolbox .

Coming soon.. see LASA webpage link

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