I’m on the job market for full-time research scientist positions!

I’m a Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft and UC Berkeley. My goal is to build safe, intelligent agents that make decisions in the open world using planning, RL, and LLMs. To do this, I develop formal/empirical approaches to decision making in intelligent agents, focusing on AI assistants, self-driving cars, humanoid robots, and planetary rovers.

Before that, I completed my PhD in Computer Science under Shlomo Zilberstein in the Resource-Bounded Reasoning Lab at UMass Amherst. My dissertation introduced a range of metareasoning techniques that optimize—particularly monitor and control—the planning and execution processes that compose intelligent agents.

Recently, I’ve won a Distinguished Paper Award at AAAI, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and was a Distinguished Teaching Award Finalist at UMass Amherst.

  • Marist College

    • BS in Computer Science and Philosophy

    • 4.0 — Valedictorian — NSF Technology Full Scholarship

  • UMass Amherst

    • MS/PhD in Computer Science

    • 4.0 — PhD Candidate with Distinction — NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

News

I joined Microsoft as a Senior Research Scientist.
— Jul 2024
I’ll be co-organizing the IROS Workshop on Building and Evaluating Ethical Robotic Systems.
— Jun 2024
MHFAIA at ICML accepted our paper on AssistanceZero, a method that scalably solves assistance games.
— Jun 2024
I co-organized the CHAI Workshop on AI safety.
— Jun 2024
We released an arXiv paper that introduces a new LLM jailbreak dataset.
— Feb 2024
ICLR accepted our paper that introduces a prompt injection dataset from our LLM game Tensor Trust.
— Jan 2024
ICRA accepted our paper that introduces ethically compliant autonomous systems under partial observability.
— Jan 2024
Our paper on the online LLM game Tensor Trust received Honorable Mention at ITIF at NeurIPS.
— Dec 2023
ReLM at AAAI accepted our paper that uses self-consistency to calibrate LLMs trained using RLHF.
— Dec 2023
AAMAS accepted our paper that formally defines deception in decision making.
— Dec 2023
ITIF at NeurIPS accepted our paper that introduces a prompt injection dataset from our LLM game Tensor Trust.
— Nov 2023
We released an arXiv paper that introduces active teacher selection in RLHF.
— Oct 2023
FMDM at NeurIPS accepted our paper that allows agents to negotiate contracts using LLMs.
— Sep 2023
I transitioned into a Research Scientist with Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley.
— Aug 2023
IROS accepted our paper that formalizes robot architectures as a composition of contract algorithms.
— Jun 2023
I co-organized the CHAI Workshop on AI safety.
— Jun 2023
PRL at IJCAI accepted our paper that uses deep RL to learn tree search.
— Jun 2023
We released an arXiv paper that surveys the intersection of fairness and sequential decision making.
— Jan 2023
Our paper on active reward learning from multiple teachers was a Best Paper Award Finalist at SafeAI at AAAI.
— Jan 2023
SafeAI at AAAI accepted our paper that investigates active reward learning from multiple teachers.
— Dec 2022
AIJ accepted our article that introduces competence-aware systems.
— Nov 2022
IROS accepted our paper that uses deep RL to select the partial state abstractions of MDPs.
— Jun 2022
ICAPS accepted our paper that introduces deep RL for hyperparameter tuning of anytime planners.
— Feb 2022
ICRA accepted our paper that introduces metareasoning for safe decision making in autonomous systems.
— Jan 2022
I started a postdoctoral fellowship under Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley.
— Nov 2021
I defended my dissertation.
— Oct 2021
I co-organized the IROS Workshop on Building and Evaluating Ethical Robotic Systems.
— Oct 2021
IROS accepted our paper that introduces an approach to improving competence-aware systems
— Jun 2021
IROS accepted our paper that introduces agent-aware state estimation.
— Jun 2021
HSDIP at ICAPS accepted our paper that introduces deep RL for hyperparameter tuning of anytime planners.
— Jun 2021
R2AW at IJCAI accepted our paper that introduces metareasoning for safety in autonomous systems.
— May 2021
AIES accepted our paper that introduces moral communities into ethically compliant autonomous systems.
— Apr 2021
SoCS accepted our paper that investigates the benefits of randomly adjusting the weight of anytime A*.
— Mar 2021
ICRA accepted our paper that introduces an approach to solving large MDPs with partial state abstractions.
— Feb 2021
Our paper on ethically compliant sequential decision making won a Distinguished Paper Award at AAAI.
— Feb 2021
AAAI accepted our paper that introduces ethically compliant sequential decision making.
— Dec 2020
AREA at ECAI accepted our paper that introduces an approach to improving competence-aware systems.
— Jul 2020
ECAI accepted my doctoral consortium paper that outlines my dissertation on metareasoning.
— Jul 2020
AISafety at IJCAI accepted our paper that introduces ethically compliant autonomous systems.
— Jun 2020
DynamicSlam at ICRA accepted our paper that introduces agent-aware state estimation.
— Jun 2020
ICRA accepted our paper that introduces model-free metareasoning for interrupting anytime planners.
— Jan 2020
AAMAS accepted our paper that introduces competence-aware systems.
— Jan 2020
ECAI accepted our paper that introduces moral autonomous systems.
— Jan 2020
IROS accepted our paper that introduces belief space metareasoning for exception recovery.
— Jun 2019
I was a finalist for the Distinguished Teaching Award for teaching assistants.
— Jan 2019
I passed my PhD candidacy qualifier exam with distinction.
— Dec 2018
I’m the primary inventor on a patent for self-driving cars.
— Nov 2018
AEGAP at IJCAI accepted our paper that introduces adaptive metareasoning for bounded rational agents.
— Jun 2018
AI4IoT at IJCAI accepted our paper that introduces belief space planning for information security.
— May 2018
IJCAI accepted our paper that introduces model-based metareasoning for interrupting anytime planners.
— Apr 2018
My advisor and I were awarded an NSF Grant on Robust Intelligence.
— Apr 2018
I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
— Apr 2018