Brown CS News

The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Wanjia Fu to support her work with Brown CS faculty member Srinath Sridhar, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.

A generous gift from Peter Norvig '78 (a Director of Research at Google and a thought leader in the areas of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval, and software engineering) established the award, which provides $13,350 annually to support an undergraduate engaged in an intensive faculty-student summer research partnership. The gift honors the life and work of Randy F. Pausch '82, a renowned expert in computer science, human-computer interaction, and design who died of complications from pancreatic cancer in 2008.

“His story is inspiring,” Peter says, “and this is an opportunity to remember him.”

Wanjia’s research focuses on enabling robots to perceive the world through touch, a sense that humans and animals rely on heavily to interact with their surroundings. “For robots to develop intelligence similar to humans,” she explains, “it’s ideal for them to have multimodal sensing capabilities that integrate both vision and touch.” While previous work in robotics has depended on installing dedicated tactile sensors, which measure the physical properties of objects they touch, her project demonstrated that whole-robot touch sensing can be achieved using only proprioceptive sensors, which measure a robot’s internal state. Wanjia trained a four-layer multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model that maps joint torques and positions to touch locations, allowing robots to detect physical contact without specialized tactile hardware.

Building on these results, Wanjia is now exploring how to localize touch on a robot dog’s body while it’s in motion, rather than standing still. “It’s fascinating to think about how tactile signals can allow robots to ‘feel’ their environment,” she says. “Our goal is to enable robots to better assist and interact with humans when in motion, creating more natural movement and potential in future human-robot collaboration.”

“I’m beyond grateful for the guidance, support, and encouragement from Professor Srinath Sridhar throughout this process,” Wanjia adds. “I’ve also learned so much from my mentor, PhD student Hongyu Li, and from other collaborators in the lab. This award gave me the opportunity to continue pushing the boundaries of how robots can perceive and respond to the world through touch.”

Wanjia’s curiosity and drive embody the spirit of the Pausch Award, aligning with Peter Norvig’s vision of supporting students who expand the reach of computer science into new domains. “In the past,” he says, “we had to build all our own tools, and we didn’t have time to combine computer science with other fields. Now, there are so many opportunities to do so. I think it’s a wise choice: you invest in things that you think will do good, and educating a student allows them to help add to the things that you’re already trying to accomplish.”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.