People

Stefanos Nikolaidis

Stefanos Nikolaidis is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His research leads to end-to-end solutions that enable deployed robotic systems to act robustly when interacting with people in practical, real-world applications. Stefanos completed his PhD at CMU's Robotics Institute and received an MS from MIT, a MEng from the University of Tokyo and a BS from the National Technical University of Athens. Stefanos' research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award, an Agilent Early Career Professor Award, and best paper awards and nominations from HRI, IROS, GECCO, ISR.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Aaquib Tabrez

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Aaquib Tabrez is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Computer Science department at USC, advised by Stefanos Nikolaidis. His research focuses on explainability and human-robot teaming, particularly enhancing communication between agents to achieve shared understanding and effective collaboration. His work has been nominated for Best Paper awards at the HRI and AAMAS conferences. Prior to USC, Aaquib did his undergrad at NITK Surathkal (India) in 2014, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2024, advised by Brad Hayes. His current research focuses on deploying foundation models within human-machine teaming scenarios to develop more adaptable and robust agents.

Ph.D.

Varun Bhatt

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Varun Bhatt is a Ph.D. student with Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis in the Computer Science department at USC. His main research goal is to build robust and generalizable intelligent agents that work well alongside humans and other intelligent agents. Towards that end, he has been working on methods to generate diverse and challenging environments via a combination of generative models and quailty diversity optimization. He completed his M.Sc. at the University of Alberta with Prof. Michael Buro and his B.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Robby Costales

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Robby is a PhD student in the CS department at USC, currently advised by Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis, with previous guidance from Prof. Fei Sha and Prof. Maja Matarić. Prior to joining ICAROS he gained experience at Google Brain as a student researcher, completed his B.S. at Columbia University where he was advised by Prof. Junfeng Yang, and participated in multiple NSF-funded summer REU programs through which he was introduced to CS research. Robby’s current research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning agents’ abilities to adapt and generalize over complex task distributions by introducing various structural inductive biases. His goal is to reduce the need for significant human supervision which current AI methods rely on heavily.

Nathaniel Dennler

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Nathan is a Ph.D. student in the computer science department at USC. He is co-advised by Prof. Maja Matarić and Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis. Nathan previously received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.Eng. in Robotics Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Nathan is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a USC Annenberg Fellow. Their current area of research is in how users can adapt robotic systems to their specific needs and preferences, specifically in the context of users with limited mobility.

Matt Fontaine

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Matt Fontaine is a PhD student at the University of Southern California advised by Stefanos Nikolaidis. Prior to coming to USC, Matt completed B.S. and M.S. degree at the University of Central Florida. He also worked as a research assistant in game-based training at UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training and as a simulation engineer at Drive.ai. His research interests are broadly in the intersection of automatic scenario generation for training, procedural content generation in games, and human-robot interaction.

Yuming Gu

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Yuming Gu is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California (USC), under the guidance of Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis. Prior to this, Yuming gained research experience at TikTok, completed his Master’s degree at USC, and conducted research at the Vision & Graphics Lab at USC-ICT, where he was advised by Prof. Hao Li. He is currently interested in the combination of Large Generative Models, Robotics and Human Digitalization.

Saeed Hedayatian

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Saeed is a Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis in the Computer Science department at USC. He recieved his B.S. from Sharif University of Technology where he worked on reinforcement learning. His current research interests broadly span decision-making and quality diversity optimization, with a specific focus on applying QD algorithms to multi-agent decision-making problems.

Sophie Hsu

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Ya-Chuan (Sophie) Hsu is a PhD student advised by Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She received her M.S degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University, where she was advised by Prof. Dylan Shell. She has broad research interests in robotics and artificial intelligence. Her current research has been centered on planning under uncertainty, particularly behavior planning for human-aware robots.

Bryon Tjanaka

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Bryon Tjanaka is a Ph.D. candidate in the ICAROS Lab at USC advised by Stefanos Nikolaidis. Bryon researches robotics and AI, particularly applications of quality diversity optimization to reinforcement learning and human-robot collaboration. Bryon is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a USC Graduate School Fellow. Previously, Bryon studied at UC Irvine, where he worked with the indylab and the Mobley Lab and graduated summa cum laude. Concurrent with his research, Bryon serves as webmaster for the Viterbi Graduate Student Association, and he has interned at Google for several summers. During high school, Bryon won the VEX Robotics World Championship with Team 86868.

Shihan Zhao

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Shihan is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at USC, advised by Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis. He received his M.S. in computer science from USC, and B.A. in computer science/cognitive science from Vassar College. He is currently interested in quality-diversity optimization and its role in facilitating machine learning generalization.

Undergraduate

Henry Chen

Henry Chen is an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science at USC Viterbi. He is currently working on contributing to the Pyribs quality diversity library. His research interests include deep learning and reinforcement learning. Outside of research, Henry is passionate about the outdoors and photography.

David Lee

David Lee is an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. At ICAROS, he is working on developing and maintaining the open source quality diversity library known as pyribs. His research interest is in quality diversity and optimization.

Siddharth Srikanth

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Sid Srikanth is an undergraduate student majoring in both Computer Science and Applied Math at the University of Southern California. His research interests include quality diversity optimization and causality inference. Outside of ICAROS, he is passionate about quantitative finance and enjoys playing basketball.

Alumni

Hejia Zhang