PhD Thesis Defense

Name: From Margin to Center: Designing Inclusive & Equitable Service Robots with Disabled Adults
Start: 2026-06-23T12:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-06-23T13:30:00-04:00
Location: Newell-Simon Hall 4305

List
Month

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	0 events 1 0 events, 1	0 events 2 0 events, 2	0 events 3 0 events, 3	0 events 4 0 events, 4	0 events 5 0 events, 5	0 events 6 0 events, 6
0 events 7 0 events, 7	0 events 8 0 events, 8	1 event 9 1 event, 9 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Yufei Wang Tuesday, June 9 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Scaling Sim2Real Learning for Robot Manipulation Abstract: Recent progress in robot learning has led to impressively capable manipulation systems. Much of the progress has come from scaling up human demonstrations; however, collecting such data through manual teleoperation is slow, costly, and hard to scale. Physics-based Simulation offers a scalable, safe, and efficient alternative for generating large demonstration datasets. However, some core [...]	1 event 10 1 event, 10 10:00 am - 11:30 am PhD Thesis Defense Samuel Triest Wednesday, June 10 10:00 am - 11:30 am Annotation-Free Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in Unstructured Environments Abstract: Navigation in unstructured environments is a capability critical to many robotics applications such as forestry, construction, disaster response and defense. In these domains, robots have the potential to eliminate much of the dull, dirty and/or dangerous work that is currently performed by humans. Unfortunately, these environments pose a unique set of challenges for navigation not [...]	1 event 11 1 event, 11 10:00 am - 11:30 am PhD Thesis Defense Chung Hee Kim Thursday, June 11 10:00 am - 11:30 am Autonomous Crop Manipulation: From Model-Based Reasoning to Learned Interaction Abstract: Robots that manipulate crops must contend with plants that occlude themselves, deform under contact, and make the manipulator contact structures it neither targets nor sees in advance. This thesis argues that autonomous manipulation of crops in unstructured agricultural environments is best advanced not by choosing between model-based and learned approaches, but by integrating them [...]	0 events 12 0 events, 12	0 events 13 0 events, 13
0 events 14 0 events, 14	2 events 15 2 events, 15 11:00 am - 12:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Mohamad Qadri Monday, June 15 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Integrating Structured Knowledge for State and Geometry Estimation Abstract: Reliable state and geometry estimation from limited observations is a fundamental challenge in robotics and perception. Observations are often noisy, partial, or ambiguous, making estimation ill-posed without additional structure. This thesis argues that robust estimation in these regimes is enabled by integrating structured knowledge into the inference process. Estimation can be viewed as inferring [...], 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Margaret Hansen Monday, June 15 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm Physical Process-Informed Mapping for Robotic Exploration Abstract: Mobile robots used for information gathering tasks rely on dense, predictive mapping of large-scale regions to determine where to take measurements. Current approaches to mapping commonly rely on Gaussian process regression to spatially correlate data, extrapolate from sparse samples, and estimate uncertainty. However, these approaches do not incorporate meaningful information about physical processes that [...]	1 event 16 1 event, 16 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Zhiqiu Lin Tuesday, June 16 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Scalable Oversight Across Generative Visual AI: Toward Visual Storytelling for Everyone Abstract: Generative visual AI has advanced by scaling data and compute, but its next bottleneck is oversight: the expert signals that evaluate, reward, and teach models what "good" looks like. Providing such oversight is increasingly difficult because foundation vision-language models now match or surpass most humans at the skills being judged. This thesis develops scalable [...]	0 events 17 0 events, 17	1 event 18 1 event, 18 11:00 am - 12:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Michelle Zhao Thursday, June 18 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Integrating Learning and Collaboration for Human-Robot Alignment Abstract: The alignment problem for robots considers how robots can learn to behave in accordance with human values. Today, robot learning paradigms enable humans to provide data (e.g., preference labels or demonstrations), which the robot uses to update its behavior (e.g., reward model or policy) to better align with human intentions. However, the current paradigm requires [...]	0 events 19 0 events, 19	0 events 20 0 events, 20
0 events 21 0 events, 21	0 events 22 0 events, 22	1 event 23 1 event, 23 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm PhD Thesis Defense Abena Boadi-Agyemang Tuesday, June 23 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm From Margin to Center: Designing Inclusive & Equitable Service Robots with Disabled Adults Abstract Service robots – autonomous systems that perform personal and professional tasks – have become a common sight in the Global North. In Human-robot interaction (HRI), researchers rarely consider the design implications of service robots for people with disabilities (PwDs) beyond controlled assistive contexts, such as private homes and assisted living facilities. Nevertheless, the purview [...]	0 events 24 0 events, 24	0 events 25 0 events, 25	0 events 26 0 events, 26	0 events 27 0 events, 27
0 events 28 0 events, 28	0 events 29 0 events, 29	0 events 30 0 events, 30