About Us

Organizers

Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay, 5th year PhD Candidate (student) at the University of Maryland, College Park and a Student Researcher at Google AI AR and Google DeepMind:

• Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay is a 5th year PhD student working on Astra-like Multimodal AI Agents. His PhD Advisors are Dr. John Dickerson and Dr. Tom Goldstein. His PhD research focuses on Multi-agent Autonomous Decision Making in AI, having worked on Multi-agent RL (MARL), Imitation Learning, Meta Learning and other Autonomous Decision Making paradigms in real world problems like climate conservation and economic applications like autonomous supply chain orchestration. He created the Multi-Agent RL Reading Group https://go.umd.edu/marl at UMD, College Park, in 2022 with 1029 participants from 6 continents with prominent speakers from industry and academia including Turing Award Laureates.

Dr. Aleksandra Faust, Research Director, Google DeepMind, Mountain View, USA:

• Dr. Aleksandra Faust is a Research Director, Autonomous Agents research lead, and Reinforcement Learning research team co-founder at Google Brain, Google DeepMind. Her research is centered around safe and scalable autonomous systems for social good, including reinforcement learning, planning, and control for robotics, autonomous driving, and digital assistants. Previously, Aleksandra founded and led Task and Motion Planning research in Robotics at Google, machine learning for self-driving car planning and controls in Waymo, and was a senior researcher in Sandia National Laboratories. She earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico with distinction, and a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aleksandra won the IEEE RAS Early Career Award for Industry, the Tom L. Popejoy Award for the best doctoral dissertation at the University of New Mexico in the period of 2011-2014, and was named Distinguished Alumna by the University of New Mexico School of Engineering. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, PC Magazine, ZdNet, VentureBeat, and was awarded Best Paper in Service Robotics at ICRA 2018, Best Paper in Reinforcement Learning for Real Life (RL4RL) at ICML 2019, Best Paper of IEEE Computer Architecture Letters in 2020, and IEEE Micro Top Picks 2023 Honorable Mention.

Dr. Andrea Colaço, Senior Staff Software Engineering Manager, Google, Mountain View, USA

• Andrea Colaço is a Senior Staff Software Engineering Manager at Google where she works on new computational sensing technologies. Her previous work has focused on low-power 3D sensing systems for mobile and wearable input applications. Andrea’s work combines modern signal processing with off-the-shelf hardware systems to create new ways of sensing objects, features and input. Some of her projects focus on application specific sensing — where the constraints of the application are incorporated in the design of the sensor itself. Andrea co-founded and led her startup 3dim team to win the Grand Prize at the 2013 MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition. For her work in next-generation touch-less interfaces, she was featured in New Scientist, Times of India, Cosmopolitan, the Wall Street Journal, and Boston Business Journal.

Dr. Arundhati Banerjee, Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics, Boston, Massachusetts: 

• Dr. Arundhati Banerjee is an Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics. Previously, she was a PhD student in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Jeff Schneider. Her research interests broadly include reinforcement learning, sequential decision making and planning for real world applications. During her PhD, Arundhati has worked on adaptive decision making algorithms in decentralized and asynchronous multi-agent systems for robotics search and rescue missions under realistic sensing, communication and resource considerations. Arundhati was also a research intern with the AI Economist team at Salesforce where she worked on reinforcement learning for mechanism design. Previously, Arundhati graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur with a combined Bachelors (Hons.) and Masters Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

Dr. John Dickerson, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and Chief Scientist, ArthurAI:

•  Dr. John Dickerson is a co-founder and Chief Scientist at Arthur, which develops and deploys enterprise-grade AI systems. He is also a tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He holds a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. At Maryland, John is also formally affiliated with the Applied Mathematics Statistics, and Scientific Computation (AMSC) program, the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), and the Maryland Transportation Institute (MTI). The academic research that he has and continues to lead has been supported by an NSF CAREER award, as well as by current or recent grants from NIST, NSA, DARPA, ARPA-E, NIH (R01), NSF, and generous gifts from industry partners such as Google. Previously, he was supported by a Facebook Fellowship (2015–2017), Siebel Scholarship (class of 2016), and an NDSEG Fellowship (2012–2015). Recently, John has become involved with worldwide blood donation, primarily through a visiting research position at Facebook. He has also been heavily involved in the world of organ allocation for more than a decade, primarily through the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS).

Dr. Tom Goldstein, Volpi-Cupal Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park:

• Tom Goldstein is the Volpi-Cupal Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and optimization, and targets applications in computer vision and signal processing. He works at the boundary between theory and practice, leveraging mathematical foundations, complex models, and efficient hardware to build practical, high-performance systems. He design optimization methods for a wide range of platforms ranging from powerful cluster/cloud computing environments to resource limited integrated circuits and FPGAs. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, Tom completed his PhD in Mathematics at UCLA, and was a research scientist at Rice University and Stanford University. Tom have been the recipient of several awards, including SIAM’s DiPrima Prize, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a JP Morgan Faculty Award, an Amazon Research Award, and a Sloan Fellowship.

Steering Committee

• Organizing Committee + 

• Dr. Luke Marris, Senior Research Engineer, Google DeepMind, London UK

• Dr. Yilun Du, Research Scientist, Google DeepMind Robotics, Mountain View USA and Upcoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University

• Dr. Micah Goldblum, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, New York City, USA

• Lavisha Aggarwal, Software Engineer, Google Augmented Reality, Seattle, USA

• Matej Jusup, 5th Year PhD Candidate, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich

• John Cole, MS student of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park USA

Program Committee

• Organizing Committee + Steering Committee +

• Dr. Marc Lanctot, Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, Montreal Canada

• Dr. Lin Li, Software Engineering Manager, Google Augmented Reality, Mountain View USA

• Vikas Bahirwani, Software Engineer, Google Augmented Reality, Mountain View USA

• Bhanu Guda, Research Engineer, Google Augmented Reality, Mountain View USA