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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for June
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Ahmed H. Qureshi (Purdue University) - Harnessing Physics Priors for Efficient and Scalable Robot Motion Learning
Thu, Jun 19, 2025 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ahmed H. Qureshi, Purdue University
Talk Title: Harnessing Physics Priors for Efficient and Scalable Robot Motion Learning
Abstract: This talk will outline the use of physics priors towards creating efficient plug-and-play algorithms for robot motion learning. These algorithms require minimal to no expert data and achieve high efficiency in both training and inference while effectively operating in complex, high-dimensional environments under various constraints. Recent advancements in robot motion learning include methods based on imitation and offline reinforcement learning, which are known to necessitate a significant amount of expert trajectories and entail high training times. In contrast, this presentation will introduce a new class of self-supervised, physics-informed neural motion policy learners. These methods aim to directly solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) that govern robot motion without depending on expert data or requiring extensive training resources. Additionally, the talk will discuss how these PDEs can create a new robot-motion-friendly mapping feature. We demonstrate that this new mapping feature is better suited for fast robot motion generation than existing mapping features, such as occupancy maps or Sign Distance Fields. This talk will demonstrate that these new physics-informed approaches outperform state-of-the-art imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning methods in terms of scalability, training efficiency, data efficiency, computational planning speed, path quality, and success rates.
Biography: Ahmed Qureshi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Dr. Qureshi is also currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO) and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). In 2024, he received the Outstanding Associate Editor award from IEEE RA-L. He has previously served on the program committees of RSS, ICRA, IROS, and CoRL. At Purdue University, Dr. Qureshi directs the Cognitive Robot Autonomy and Learning (CoRAL) Lab. His group conducts fundamental and applied research in robot motion planning and control with the aim of developing robots that can understand the general laws of physics and plan their movements in real time with minimal to no expert demonstrations. His work addresses problems such as scalable and fast motion planning, dexterous manipulation, active perception, and multiagent task and motion planning. Dr. Qureshi's contributions have been recognized with spotlight and best paper awards at various academic venues. Prior to his current roles, he earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from NUST, Pakistan, an M.S. in Engineering from Osaka University, Japan, and a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control from the University of California San Diego.
Host: Daniel Seita
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone (USC) is invited
Contact: CS Faculty Affairs
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC) Seminar
Fri, Jun 20, 2025 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, USC School of Advanced Computing
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Dinesh Jayaraman, University of Pennsylvania
Talk Title: Engineering Better Robot Learners: Exploration and Exploitation
Abstract: Industry is placing big bets on "brute forcing" robotic control, but such approaches ignore the centrality of resource constraints in robotics on power, compute, time, data, etc. Towards building a true engineering discipline of robotics, my research group has been "exploiting and exploring" robot learning: exploiting to push the limits of what can be achieved with today's prevalent principles at various resource constraints, and "exploring" better design principles for efficient and minimalist robots in the future. As examples of “exploit”, we have trained quadruped robots to perform circus tricks on yoga balls and robot arms to perform household tasks in entirely unseen scenes with unseen objects. As examples of “explore”, we are studying the sensory requirements of robot learners: what sensors do they need and when do they need them during training and task execution? In this talk, I will highlight these examples and discuss some lessons we have learned in our research towards better-engineered robot learners.
Biography: Dinesh Jayaraman is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's CIS department and GRASP lab. He leads the Perception, Action, and Learning (Penn PAL) research group, which works at the intersections of computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. Dinesh received his PhD (2017) from UT Austin, before becoming a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley (2017-19). Dinesh's research has received a Best Paper Award at CORL '22, a Best Paper Runner-Up Award at ICRA '18, a Best Application Paper Award at ACCV '16, the NSF CAREER award '23, an Amazon Research Award '21, and been covered in The Economist, TechCrunch, and several other press outlets. His webpage is at: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~dineshj/
Host: Prof. Erdem Biyik
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97616702619?pwd=aiV4aX7mgVCUO3qUVmJ5DIWipZBy12.1Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97616702619?pwd=aiV4aX7mgVCUO3qUVmJ5DIWipZBy12.1
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: ERDEM BIYIK
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC) Seminar
Thu, Jun 26, 2025 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, USC School of Advanced Computing
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Naman Shah, Brown University
Talk Title: Autonomously Learning World-Model Representations For Efficient Robot Planning
Abstract: In recent years, it has been clear that planning is an essential tool for robots to achieve complex goals. However, robots often heavily rely on humans to provide "world models" that enable long-horizon planning. It is not only expensive to create such world models as it requires human experts who understand the domains as well as limitations of the robot, but these human-generated world models are often biased by human intuition and kinematic constraints. In this talk, I will present my research focusing on autonomously learning plannable world models. The talk would involve discussing approaches on task and motion planning, neuro-symbolic abstractions for motion planning, and how we can learn world models for task and motion planning.
Biography: Naman is a Postdoctoral researcher in the Intelligent Robots Lab (IRL) with Prof. George Konidaris. He has completed his PhD from Arizona State University, supervised by Prof. Siddharth Srivastava. His research interest lies in investigating methods for autonomously inventing generalizable and plannable world models for robotics tasks. He has been an intern with Palo Alto Research Center, Amazon Robotics, and Toyota Research Institute. Naman has also achieved several graduate fellowships at ASU and a Best Demo Paper Award at AAMAS 2022.
Host: Prof. Erdem Biyik
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/93271412501?pwd=uYyZGnx1XgMS0i9JbEJpIx7Nz57Lbk.1More Information: Naman Shah's Visit - 6_26_25.pdf
Location: 248
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/93271412501?pwd=uYyZGnx1XgMS0i9JbEJpIx7Nz57Lbk.1
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: ERDEM BIYIK
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
