About
I am a Computing Innovation Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with a PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
My goal is to create robots and learning agents with exceptional adaptability and capabilities that respect human Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Selected Publications
See my Google Scholar page for the complete and up to date list.
2025
A Longitudinal Autoethnography of Email Access for a Professional with Chronic Illness and ADHD: Preliminary Insights - SIGACCESS 2025
LLM-Driven Robots Risk Enacting Discrimination, Violence, and Unlawful Actions - International Journal of Social Robotics 2025
Evaluates how large language models integrated into robotic systems may exhibit discriminatory behaviors and unsafe responses when encountering diverse populations or dangerous instructions.
2024
SCoFT: Self-Contrastive Fine-Tuning for Equitable Image Generation - CVPR 2024
Love, Joy, and Autism Robots: A Metareview and Provocatype - A3DE workshop @ HRI 2024
Examines how autism research in robotics has prioritized interventions aimed at conforming neurodivergent individuals to neurotypical norms, rather than centering their own experiences and needs.
Can ‘Robots Won’t Save Japan’ Save Robotics? Reviewing an Ethnography of Eldercare Automation - arXiv 2024
Reviews James Adrian Wright’s ethnography “Robots Won’t Save Japan,” examining elder care robotics and augmenting insights with overlooked perspectives from Disability and Robotics research.
2023
Anti-ableist language is fully compatible with high-quality autism research: Response to Singer et al.(2023) - Autism Research 2023
Towards Equitable Agile Research and Development of AI and Robotics - WeRobot 2023 / arXiv 2024
Proposes adapting Agile/Scrum R&D methodologies to build organizational equity capabilities and integrate evidence-based fairness practices in AI and robotics development.
2022
Robots Enact Malignant Stereotypes - FAccT ‘22 (DOI)
Evaluates how ML bias manifests in robots that physically act in the world, showing that CLIP-powered robotic manipulation methods enact toxic stereotypes with respect to gender, race, and scientifically-discredited physiognomy.
2021
“Good Robot! Now Watch This!”: Repurposing Reinforcement Learning for Task-to-Task Transfer - CoRL 2021
Guiding Multi-Step Rearrangement Tasks with Natural Language Instructions - CoRL 2021
Effective Visual Robot Learning: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University 2021
2020
“Good Robot!”: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Tasks with Sim to Real Transfer - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2020
Presented at IROS 2020.
2019
SharpDARTS: Faster and More Accurate Differentiable Architecture Search - arXiv 2019
This work set state of the art on CIFAR-10 and matched state of the art on ImageNet at mobile scale, proposing Differentiable Hyperparameter Search and Cosine Power Annealing.
The CoSTAR Block Stacking Dataset: Learning with Workspace Constraints - IROS 2019
A dynamic robotics dataset with HyperTree Neural Architecture Search for refining neural network models. Dataset Website
2018
Evaluating methods for end-user creation of robot task plans - IROS 2018
2017
CoSTAR: Instructing Collaborative Robots with Behavior Trees and Vision - ICRA 2017
Defines perception and spatial reasoning abstractions to enable end-users to create robust task plans. Winner of the 2016 KUKA Innovation Award in flexible manufacturing competition.
User Experience of the CoSTAR System for Instruction of Collaborative Robots - IROS 2017
User study demonstrating the CoSTAR flexible manufacturing system’s effectiveness for specifying task plans.
Computing Innovation Fellow
This fellowship was awarded by the Computing Research Association with National Science Foundation support. My postdoctoral research at Georgia Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University develops human and technical principles, processes, metrics, and algorithms that advance Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in computational methods for Robotics and AI.
Research Projects
Generic Robotics Library
Generic Robotics Library - Open source C++ robotics software library.
Robone
Robotic hip replacement surgical assistant robot.
Past Employment
Robotics Engineer
National Robotics Engineering Center, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Worked on autonomous orchard and field tractors for farming automation.
Open Source Contributions
Boost.Container static_vector
Contributed to Boost C++ Libraries. The static_vector is a sequence container like std::vector with the benefits of statically allocated storage as found in std::array.
Earlier Projects
CalcHundter
Cross-platform calculator app for programming arithmetic and bit operations, designed using HCI research principles.
Wii Remote Controlled Robot
Robot controlled by Wii remote (2007).
CMU Buggy
Engineer for Fringe Racing, designing and building human-powered ultra-light carbon composite vehicles. Fringe Racing placed first in the Carnegie Mellon Sweepstakes Design Competition in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Elected Chairman of the Sweepstakes Committee for 2009, leading the organization with 13 teams and 250 members.
Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion Reactor
High school research project on an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion reactor that achieved plasma.