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.

Ph.D.

Saeed Hedayatian

Website Email

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.

Shihan Zhao

Website Email

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.

Darius Mahjoob

Website Email

Darius Mahjoob is an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science and Business Administration with minors in AI Applications and Cybersecurity at the University of Southern California. He is also pursuing his Master's degree with USC in Electrical and Computer Engineering with an emphasis in Machine Learning. His research interests include forecasting models, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, specifically in quality diversity and intelligent game design. Outside of ICAROS, he is passionate about music composition for video games, cryptography, and fantasy football.

Siddharth Srikanth

Website Email

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

Yuming Gu