Nadia Figueroa, PhD

Robots • Humans • Machine Learning

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT CSAIL advised by Prof. Julie A. Shah. Starting Jan. 1, 2022 I will join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) and will be a Faculty Advisor in the GRASP lab. My group will focus on developing learning and control schemes, with rigorous guarantees, for robots to safely and efficiently interact with humans and the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit.

Prospective students and post-docs: If you are a BSc/MSc/PhD student already enrolled/accepted at Penn MEAM/ESE/CIS or searching for a post-doc opportunity to start Spring 2022, feel free to reach out to me. For students not enrolled at Penn click here. Before contacting me, I recommend reading my research statement and commitment to diversity, equity & inclusion.

I obtained a PhD in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems from EPFL, under the supervision of Prof. Aude Billard at the LASA lab. Prior to PhD studies, I spent time as a research assistant at the Robotics and Mechatronics Institute of the German Aerospace Center and at the Engineering Department of NYU Abu Dhabi. I hold a BSc in Mechatronics from Monterrey Tech and MSc in Automation and Robotics from TU Dortmund.

Google Scholar • LinkedIn • Github • CV • Short Bio • PhD Thesis • Textbook

Contact: 32 Vassar St. Cambridge, MA 02139 -- Office 32-271 (Stata)
Email: nadiafig [at] mit [dot] edu

• [July 2021] Our work on provably safe and efficient motion planning with uncertain human dynamics [assisted dressing] (led by Shen Li) will be presented at RSS 2021!
• [Mar. 2021] Our work on understanding robot controllers via sampling (led by Yilun Zhou and Serena Booth) got a shoutout in the MIT News!
• [Jan. 2021] I've co-organized a virtual screening (Jan. 15-22) and co-moderated a panel discussion (Jan. 22) of the film Picture a Scientist with an incredible group of female scientists from MIT, see event description , for more details you can find the a full post-event debrief report here .
• [Jan. 2021] I was invited to give a talk at the Humans interacting with Autonomy virtual workshop organized by the MIT AeroAstro department.
• [Feb. 2020] I was a finalist for the prestigious Georges Giralt PhD award for the best doctoral thesis in robotics in Europe in 2020. The award ceremony (see pic) was held Malaga (Spain) during the ERF 2020 Forum
• [Jan. 2020] I joined the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT CSAIL as a Postdoctoral Associate.
• [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.
-> 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).
• [May 2019] At ICRA 2019 I gave a tutorial on "Dynamical System-based Learning from Demonstration". Together with my PhD advisor and colleagues we will present the DS-learning methods developed in the lab and how to use them for different applications.

• [Feb. 2020] Finalist for the euRobotics George Giralt PhD award 2020 edition (Best European PhD Thesis in Robotics).
• [Dec. 2019] Finalist for the EPFL Doctoral Program distinction . This distinction is granted to a selection of very high quality theses, in order to highlight the doctoral candidates’ research work and their scientific merit.
• [Sept. 2019] Nominated for the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Ltd. Award . The prize is awarded for particularly excellent master’s and/or doctoral work in the fields of energy/information/automation technology.
• [April 2017] Top 5 finalists in the KUKA Innovation Award
• [RSS 2016] Winner of Best Student Paper award and finalist for Best Conference Paper and Best Systems Paper.
• [HRI 2016] 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 was 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 .

• [April 2021] 1h Virtual Spring 2021 CS Colloquium for the NYU Courant Computer Science department, host: Prof. Ludovic Righetti.
• [Mar. 2021] 1h Virtual GRASP/MEAM Seminar for the UPENN MEAM department & GRASP Lab, host: Prof. Mark Yim.
• [Mar. 2021] 1h Virtual EECS Special Seminar for the MIT EECS department, host: Prof. Daniela Rus.
• [Feb. 2021] 1h Virtual Research Seminar for the Yale MEMS department, host: Prof. Aaron Dollar.
• [Jan. 2021] 15min Virtual talk at the MIT AeroAstro Humans interacting with Autonomy Virtual Workshop.
• [Aug. 2019] 45min Research Seminar at University of Washington (Seattle), host: Prof. Dieter Fox.
• [July 2019] 45min Research Seminar at MIT, host: Prof. Julie Shah.
• [ICRA 2019] Lectures and exercises sessions at the Tutorial on Dynamical System-based Learning from Demonstration, that I co-organized.
• [Dec. 2018] 30min talk at the SwissAI Machine Learning meetup at EPFL
• [Nov. 2018] 12min talk at the Swiss Machine Learning Day (SMLD) at EPFL
• [CORL 2018] 4min spotlight presentation for accepted paper.
• [Aug. 2018] 45min Research Seminar at UT Austin (Texas), host: Prof. Andrea Thomaz.
• [July. 2018] Two lectures (lecture 1, lecture 2) + exercise session at the Tutorial on Dynamical system-based Learning from Demonstration at EPFL, that I co-organized.
• [ICRA 2018] 12min talk at the Workshop on Machine Learning in the Planning and Control of Robot Motion.
• [ICRA 2018] 12min talk at the Workshop on Cognitive Whole-Body Control for Compliant Robot Manipulation.
• [IROS 2017] 12min talk at the Workshop on Synergies between Learning and Interaction.
• [IROS 2017] 15min talk at the Workshop on Micro-Data: The New Frontier of Robot Learning?.
• [RSS 2016] 5min presentation for accepted paper.

• Treasurer of the Researchers and Postdocs Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics (RPA3) within the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT for the 2020-2021 Academic Year.
• Community Development and Diversity Co-Chair of the RPA3 within the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT for the 2020-2021 Academic Year.
• Member of the MIT Postdoc Association - Advocacy and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee (PDA-DE&I). Within this committee I was part of the team of postdocs that conducted and analyzed results on the "Postdoc Hiring and Recruitment at MIT Survey" with the initial goal of examining the impact hiring and recruiting has on the diversity of the postdoc population at MIT. The full report of our survey analysis can be found here .
• Member of the CSAIL Postdoc and Graduate Student Council (CPGSC) at MIT CSAIL. This council was formed this year by Prof. Daniela Rus in an effort to tackle issues important to the CSAIL community of graduate students and postdocs such as DE&I, harrasment, mental health and faculty relations.
• Member of the CSAIL Ahead Committee led by Prof. Daniel Jackson focused on improving community and culture at CSAIL.
• Mentor within the Minds Matter Boston (MMB) program for the Junior Class of 2020-2021.

• My PhD research projects at EPFL (Switzerland) were mostly funded by the European Union via an FP7 project Robohow and the H2020 projects Cogimon and SecondHands .
• My current Postdoc research projects at MIT (USA) are partly funded by Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Inc. in an effort to endow the industrial Cobot ASSISTA with the capabilities to efficiently learn from demonstrations in factories and warehouses.

Learning Complex Sequential Tasks from Demonstration: Uni-Manual and Bi-Manual Case Studies
Project Webpage and Code for Learning and Execution of Complex Sequential Tasks: https://nbfigueroa.github.io/complex-seq-task-learning/

Learning Stable Dynamical System (DS) Representations of Complex Motions from Demonstrations: Task and Joint Space Approaches applied to Manipulation, Navigation and Co-Manipulation
• Project Webpage and Code for Learning and Execution of Task-Space DS: https://nbfigueroa.github.io/pc-gmm-ds-learning/
• Project Webpage and Code for Learning and Execution of Joint-Space DS: https://nbfigueroa.github.io/jtds-learning/
• Project Webpage and Code for Learning and Execution of LAGS-DS: https://nbfigueroa.github.io/lags-ds-learning/
Multi-Robot Arms Control: Dynamical System based Coordination, Transitioning Strategies and Learning-based Self-Collision Avoidance
• Project Webpage and Code for Multi-arm coordination strategies: https://nbfigueroa.github.io/multi-arm-coordination/

Humanoid Robot Control: Dynamical System based Adaptive Grasping, Navigation and Co-Manipulation and Learning-based Self-Collision Avoidance
• Project Webpage and Code for DS-based iCub motion planning: https://epfl-lasa.github.io/iCub-Assistant/

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