RI CALENDAR EVENT Who: Shashwat Singh Type: RI Thesis Proposal Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 Time: 03:30PM - 05:00PM (ET) Location: NSH 4305 Zoom link: Here Title: Extending Robot Mobility Through Mechanical Adaptation Abstract: Unstructured terrain presents diverse challenges to robot locomotion, including obstacles, deformable surfaces, and confined passages. Terrain conditions also change with time, as [...]

Date: October 26, 2026 Time: 10:00-11:30 AM ET Type:  RI PhD Thesis Proposal Zoom Link Location: NSH 4305 Title: Reconciling Adaptation and Generality in Robot Policies Who: Yilin Wu Abstract: Generalist robot policies—such as vision-language-action models (VLAs)—are trained end-to-end on large observation-action datasets and can perform increasingly diverse manipulation tasks. Yet these policies remain unreliable amid the complexity [...]

Who: Sriram Narayanan Type: RI Thesis Proposal Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 Time: 02:00PM - 03:30PM (ET) Location: NSH 4305 Zoom link: Here Title: Thermal Computational Imaging through Light and Heat Transport Abstract: Computer vision seeks to understand the physical world from images, yet much of this understanding remains rooted in the appearance of reflected visible light. [...]

Date: October 28, 2026 Time: 11:00 AM -12:30 PM ET Type:  RI PhD Thesis Proposal Zoom Link Location: NSH 3305 Title: Learning to Explore and Learning from Exploration for Language Models Who: Chen Wu Abstract: Learning from experience offers a way for language models to improve beyond the solutions available in their training data. Instead of relying only on demonstrations, a [...]