Robotics is a research area that requires expertise in different disciplines such as computer science, engineering, psychology and cognitive science. I am interested in collaborating with researchers and students from any of the related disciplines on problems of mutual interest.

For researchers interested in collaboration:
My recent projects and papers describe my current research interests. Please contact me if you want to discuss a research topic for potential collaboration.

For students interested in working with me:

• Research supervision: If you would like me to supervise your thesis or dissertation, first look at my research interests and recent papers. Then, please send me online links to the following:
  • Research statement (1-2 pages) describing the project you think we can work on together. The statement can include problem background, research objectives, approach/methodology, and references.
  • CV and transcripts.
  • A recommendation letter from one of your references, preferably someone who has supervised your research.
  Please do not send me attachments because these will get filtered and deleted. Please make sure I can access the documents without having to create or login to an account. Please also let me know if you will be expecting financial support. I am able to support students when I have funds available, and the student's academic preparation and interests match the funded project. If you are already a student at University of Edinburgh, you can also come meet me during office hours to discuss your ideas.
  
  
• Project ideas: if you are a student at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and you want to work on a short-term project (e.g., Summer project, final-year project) under my supervision, here are some ideas to consider:
  • Knowledge representation and explainable reasoning: enable assistive robots/agents to represent and reason with different descriptions of commonsense domain knowledge and uncertainty, and to explain their decisions and beliefs to humans.
  • Interactive learning and teamwork: enable robots/agents to collaborate without prior coordination by interactively learning predictive models of the behavior of other agents.
  • Robot grasping and manipulation: enable robot manipulator to interactively learn models of dynamics for smooth control during manipulation tasks (e.g., industrial applications, prostheses). Also, create a dataset (objects, scenes) and measures for benchmarking robot grasping and manipulation.
  • Robot perception and reasoning: enable assistive robot to extract contextual information from input scenes, and plan and execute a sequence of actions to achieve the desired configuration of objects in different rooms.
  • Human cognition and control: explore different representations and reasoning methods to computationally model and understand perception, reasoning, control, and learning in humans; also adapt these models for use in robots collaborating with huamns.
  • Non-robotics applications: develop and adapt algorithms for prediction and estimation problems in complex application domains, e.g., predictions of traffic flow and non-recurrent conditions on a motorway, predictions of extreme weather events and regional weather parameters under future climate change scenarios, and estimates of agricultural coefficients and yield using historical (remote sensing) data.



• Internships: I am open to taking on students interested in short-term internships (e.g., in the Summer), but I cannot currently provide financial support for these students. If you are not expecting financial support, please send me a link to your CV, transcripts, and a short description of the problem that you think we can explore together. As stated above, please do not send me these (or other documents) as attachments.



• If you want to apply to the postgraduate or undergraduate program at my institution, please follow the instructions available online. Admissions decisions are made by appropriate committees. Please do not send me an email and/or documents asking me to evaluate your chances of being accepted to our programs. If you want me to supervise your thesis or dissertation, please follow the instructions given above.