George Konidaris Has Been Promoted To Associate Professor With Tenure
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 16, 2022
Brown CS is happy to announce that George Konidaris has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure (pending the approval of Brown's Corporation), effective as of July 1, 2022.
George came to Brown in 2016 after completing postdoctoral research at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2011-2014 and then serving as Assistant Professor at Duke University from 2014-2016. Since 2016, he's also worked as Chief Roboticist for Realtime Robotics, a startup he co-founded to commercialize the invention of a specialized robot motion planning processor capable of sub-millisecond planning.
George's research aims to build intelligent, autonomous, general-purpose robots that are generally capable in a wide variety of tasks and environments. His focus is on understanding how to design agents that learn abstraction hierarchies that enable fast, goal-oriented planning, and he develops and applies techniques from machine learning, reinforcement learning, optimal control and planning to construct well-grounded hierarchies that result in fast planning for common cases, and are robust to uncertainty at every level of control. Konidaris believes that advances in all of these areas, as well as advances in how to integrate these areas, is necessary to solve the AI problem.
Recently, George was invited to give talks at the Third Conference on Robot Learning, the NeurIPS 2021 Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop, and the 5th Workshop on Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots. His recent honors include co-authoring a paper ("Multi-Resolution POMDP Planning for Multi-Object Search in 3D") that won the IROS 2021 Best RoboCup Paper Award and earning Brown University's Karen T. Romer Prize for Undergraduate Advising and Mentoring, the IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize ("From Skills to Symbols: Learning Symbolic Representations for Abstract High-Level Planning"), and an NSF CAREER Award.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication and Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.
