Student Talks

Name: Empirically Grounded LLM-based Virtual Patients for Psychotherapy Training: Design, Modeling, and Evaluation
Start: 2026-01-30T09:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-01-30T10:30:00-05:00
Location: Gates Hillman Center 6115

List
Month

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				0 events 1 0 events, 1	0 events 2 0 events, 2	0 events 3 0 events, 3
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0 events 11 0 events, 11	0 events 12 0 events, 12	2 events 13 2 events, 13 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Akash Sharma Tuesday, January 13 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm Self-supervised tactile perception for robot dexterity Abstract: Humans are incredibly dexterous. We interact with and manipulate tools effortlessly, leveraging touch without a second thought. Yet, replicating this level of dexterity in robots is a major challenge. While the robotics community, recognizing the importance of touch in fine manipulation, has developed a wide variety of tactile sensors, how best to leverage these [...], 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm PhD Thesis Defense Rohan Choudhury Tuesday, January 13 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Efficient Visual Modeling with Adaptive Representations Abstract: While image understanding, generation, and manipulation have matured rapidly in recent years, video remains challenging due to the significantly larger input size. As a result, tasks such as generating long videos or understanding extended video sequences remain out of reach for current models due to their computational cost. This talk presents a series of [...]	0 events 14 0 events, 14	1 event 15 1 event, 15 8:30 am - 10:00 am PhD Thesis Proposal Hsu-kuang Chiu Thursday, January 15 8:30 am - 10:00 am Toward Scalable Architectures for Multimodal LLM-based Cooperative Autonomous Driving Abstract: Despite the tremendous progress made in autonomous driving over the years, the safety of autonomous vehicles still requires further improvement before they can operate worldwide with full human trust. One principal safety concern is that each individual vehicle may have a limited field of view due to finite detection ranges, potential sensor failures, or occlusions [...]	0 events 16 0 events, 16	0 events 17 0 events, 17
0 events 18 0 events, 18	0 events 19 0 events, 19	1 event 20 1 event, 20 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Muhammad Suhail Saleem Tuesday, January 20 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm Towards Manipulation in the Blind: Motion Planning for Manipulation under Uncertainty using Contacts Abstract: Humans routinely rely on the sense of touch to better perceive the world. In environments characterized by poor lighting, occlusions, limited fields of view, or sparse visual features, contact feedback often becomes a primary source of information for perceiving the environment and successfully completing manipulation tasks. Everyday examples include locating a light switch in the [...]	0 events 21 0 events, 21	0 events 22 0 events, 22	0 events 23 0 events, 23	0 events 24 0 events, 24
0 events 25 0 events, 25	0 events 26 0 events, 26	1 event 27 1 event, 27 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Rui Chen Tuesday, January 27 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm Rethinking Robot Safety: Adaptive and Scalable Methods for Real-World Autonomy Abstract: Safe autonomy in the real world requires more than safety in structured, low-dimensional settings. Robots deployed in everyday environments must cope with non-stationarity—objectives and dynamics that change due to human preferences or evolving operating conditions—and must also scale safety reasoning to high-dimensional robots and environments, where perception, dynamics, and safety constraints can be complex [...]	0 events 28 0 events, 28	0 events 29 0 events, 29	1 event 30 1 event, 30 9:00 am - 10:30 am PhD Thesis Proposal Angela Chen Friday, January 30 9:00 am - 10:30 am Empirically Grounded LLM-based Virtual Patients for Psychotherapy Training: Design, Modeling, and Evaluation Abstract: The need for mental health care continues to outpace the supply of trained psychotherapists, while psychotherapy training remains constrained by limited supervision time and scarce opportunities for repeated, feedback-rich practice in realistic scenarios. Simulation-based training can mitigate these constraints, but actor-based standardized patients are costly and difficult to scale, and many clinically challenging moments [...]	0 events 31 0 events, 31