PhD Thesis Defense

Name: RI PhD Thesis Defense – Kenneth Shaw
Start: 2026-05-22T15:30:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-22T17:00:00-04:00
Location: Newell-Simon Hall 3305

List
Month

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0 events 10 0 events, 10	1 event 11 1 event, 11 10:00 am - 11:30 am PhD Thesis Defense Moonyoung Lee Monday, May 11 10:00 am - 11:30 am Leveraging Tactile Sensing to Resolve Uncertainty in Contact-Rich Manipulation Abstract: Manipulation in agricultural and unstructured environments often involves contact-rich interactions with occluded objects. Most deployed systems treat contact as a hazard and rely on vision alone, which limits deployment from real-world field settings. This thesis adopts a different perspective: contact is a strategy for obtaining information where vision cannot provide. Touch can reveal additional [...]	0 events 12 0 events, 12	1 event 13 1 event, 13 9:00 am - 10:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Tejus Gupta Wednesday, May 13 9:00 am - 10:30 pm Learning Bayesian Experimental Design Policies Efficiently Abstract: Bayesian Experimental Design (BED) provides a principled framework for informative data collection, and is applied across domains as varied as adaptive clinical trials, ecological monitoring, hyperparameter optimization, and robotic search. Despite this broad applicability, BED methods remain difficult to deploy in practice: high-quality decision-making is computationally expensive, calibrated uncertainty estimation in sequential decision problems [...]	0 events 14 0 events, 14	0 events 15 0 events, 15	0 events 16 0 events, 16
0 events 17 0 events, 17	1 event 18 1 event, 18 11:00 am - 12:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Zilin Si Monday, May 18 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Designing A Learning-Enabled Non-Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand Framework for Dexterous Manipulation Abstract: As robots transition into unstructured human environments, achieving dexterous manipulation across diverse tasks becomes increasingly crucial yet remains challenging. This objective underscores the value of high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robotic hands capable of versatile grasping and in-hand manipulation. Complementing the hardware, success in these settings also depends on intelligent and autonomous hand control strategies that provide [...]	1 event 19 1 event, 19 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PhD Thesis Defense Junyu (Jenny) Nan Tuesday, May 19 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm RI PhD Thesis Defense – Junyu Nan Date: Tuesday May 19, 2026 Time: 1:00 - 3:00PM (EST) Location: NSH (Newell Simon Hall) 3305 Zoom Link Type: PhD Thesis Defense Title: Learning Geometric, Physical, and Semantic Priors for Embodied Planning and Control Abstract: Embodied intelligence requires perceiving, predicting, and acting in environments with an understanding of the geometric, semantic, and physical structure of the world. Recently, [...]	0 events 20 0 events, 20	0 events 21 0 events, 21	1 event 22 1 event, 22 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm PhD Thesis Defense Kenneth Shaw Friday, May 22 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm RI PhD Thesis Defense – Kenneth Shaw Date: Friday May 22 Time: 3:30PM - 4:30PM (EST) Location: NSH (Newell Simon Hall) 3305 ZOOM Link Title: Building Robot Hands and Teaching Dexterity Abstract: Our human hands are masterpieces of power and precision, capable of typing, hammering, or delicately using chopsticks. Yet most robots today still rely on simple two-finger grippers in controlled settings because dexterous hands are [...]	0 events 23 0 events, 23
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