Pulkit Verma

Postdoc at Interactive Robotics Group, MIT

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I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group at CSAIL and AeroAstro, MIT, working with Prof. Julie Shah. I completed my Ph.D. from the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, working with Prof. Siddharth Srivastava. During my Ph.D., I was also affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, and ASU’s Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming. I have completed M.Tech. from Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Guwahati, advised by Prof. Pradip K. Das.

My primary interests lie in AI safety, AI planning, action-model learning, interpretability, and analysis of abstractions. My research focuses on safe and reliable behavior of AI agents. I am currently investigating the minimal set of requirements in an AI system that would enable a user to assess and understand the limits of its safe operability.

In the past, I have worked in the areas of bio-inspired robotics, speech processing, and internet of things.


News

Dec 09, 2024 Our work Using Explainable AI and Hierarchical Planning for Outreach with Robots has been accepted at AAAI 2025 Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence.
Oct 28, 2024 Co-organizing the AAAI 2025 Tutorial on User-Driven Capability Assessment of Taskable AI Systems with Siddharth Srivastava. More details to follow.
Sep 16, 2024 Started as a Postdoc Associate with Julie Shah in the Interactive Robotics Group at CSAIL and AeroAstro, MIT.
Apr 03, 2024 Successfully defended my doctoral dissertation Data-Efficient Paradigms for Personalized Assessment of Taskable AI Systems. Thanks to my advisor Siddharth Srivastava, and committee members Nancy Cooke, Georgios Fainekos, and Yu “Tony” Zhang. Slides and Video now available too.
Feb 12, 2024 Our work Epistemic Exploration for Generalizable Planning and Learning in Non-Stationary Settings has been accepted at ICAPS 2024.

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