Making is Decision Making
Abstract: Human creation of high-quality content requires making decisions – from coarse, high-level decisions about content and style, to precise low-level decisions about the color of an individual pixel. Modern generative AI promises to serve a collaborative assistant capable of executing design decisions specified in simple text prompts into high-quality content. Yet today’s AI systems [...]
RI PhD Thesis Defense – Ingrid Navarro Anaya
Date: September 18th, 2026 Time: 10:00 AM (ET) Zoom: link Location: NSH 4305 Type: PhD Thesis Defense Who: Ingrid Navarro Anaya Title: Towards Generalizable Motion Prediction under Distribution Shifts Abstract: Autonomous robots are increasingly expected to operate in dynamic, human-centered environments. To do so safely and efficiently, they must reason about how people move [...]
Decision-Making in a World of Latent Particles
Abstract: Robots must often make decisions in scenes containing many objects: they need to identify what is present, understand where objects are, predict how they will interact, and choose actions accordingly. Learning these capabilities directly from pixels is challenging, especially when the number and arrangement of objects can change from one scene to another. In [...]
Adaptive Cameras: Bridging Novel Sensors and Robot Perception
Abstract: Most cameras on robots today capture images without considering scene content. In contrast, animal eyes have fast mechanical movements that control how the scene is imaged in detail by the fovea, where visual acuity is highest. The prevalence of active vision during biological imaging, and the wide variety of it, makes it very clear [...]
