A Brief Bio
I am an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. Previously, I have been a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University upon receiving the NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship, and worked with the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab headed by Jeannette Bohg. I completed my PhD work on data-efficient simulation-to-reality transfer at KTH (Sweden) in the group headed by Danica Kragic. I also had the opportunity to intern at NVIDIA Robotics (Seattle, USA) and Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK).
Before that, I obtained my Master's degree from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I developed data-efficient methods for learning controllers for bipedal locomotion (with Akshara Rai and Chris Atkeson). During my time at CMU, my advisor was Emma Brunskill, and in her group I also worked on data-efficient reinforcement learning.
A few years earlier, I was a software engineer at Google, first in the Search Personalization group and then in the Character Recognition team (developing an open-source OCR engine Tesseract).
Please refer to contactrika.github.io for a research overview, bio, and information about current and previous work.
Updates
I currently have multiple fully funded PhD positions in robot learning, novel robot hardware design, and RL. If you are interested in working with me - please reach out.
While my recent work focused on robotics, I am returning to my long-term interest in reinforcement learning algorithms, thus also looking for students interested in data-efficient RL, active learning & exploration, and decision-making for scientific & environmental domains.
Publications
For a list of publications, please see this Google Scholar profile page.
