Research

Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, Brown University (2025-)

University Professor of Computer Science, Brown University (2012-)

• Co-director of the Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative (2013-) with Betram Malle.

• Associate Department Chair (2018-2019)

• Founding member of BigAI (Brown Integrative General Artificial Intelligence)

Leadership Roles

• Division Director, Information and Intelligent Systems, National Science Foundation (2022-2025)

• Program co-chair for Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (2019) with Cate Hartley.

• Communications co-chair for Neural Information Processing Systems (2019) with Katherine Gorman.

• Program co-chair of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2013) with Marie desJardins.

• General chair of International Conference on Machine Learning (2013).

• Department Chair, Rutgers University Department of Computer Science (2009-2012).

• Programme co-chair of International Conference on Machine Learning (2009) with Leon Boutou.

Current PhD Students

Francisco Piedrahita

Max Zuo

Jessica Zosa Forde

Former PhD Students (Brown)

Jun Ki Li (now Associate Research Professor, Seoul National University)

Carl Trimbach (now Applied Machine Learning Scientist at Grainger)

Lucas Lehnert (now Assistant Professor at the U. Saskatchewan)

(S)am Saarinen (now leading Edapt Technologies)

Kavosh Asadi (now senior scientist at Meta)

Guan "Royal" Wang (now Founder and Chairman of Learnable.ai)

David Abel (now Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind and Honorary Fellow at U.of Edinburgh)

Stephen Brawner (now robotics consultant)

Mark Ho* (now Assistant Professor at NYU)

Former Undergrad Student Collaborators

Zhiyuan Zhou (now PhD student at Berkeley)

Dilip Arumugam (now postdoc at Princeton)

Jacob Beck (now Research Scientist at Oracle Labs)

Evan Cater (now (Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI)

Matt Cooper (Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI)

D. Ellis Hershkowitz (now faculty at Brown)

Zach Horvitz (now PhD student at Columbia)

Seungchan Kim (now PhD student at CMU)

Zoe Papakipos (now Software Engineer at Meta)

Former PhD Student Collaborators

Cam Allen (now postdoc at Berkeley)

Khimya Khetarpal (now Senior Research Scientist at Google Deepmind)

Max Kleiman-Weiner (now Assistant Professor at U.Washington)

Erwan Lecarpentier (now video game developer at Pinky Punky Seal)

Robert Loftin (now Lecturer/Assistant Professor at U. Sheffield)

Bei Peng (now Lecturer/Assistant Professor at U. Sheffield)

Former PhD Students (Rutgers)

John Asmuth (now Vice President at Two Sigma)

Monica Babes-Vroman (now Visiting Res. Prof at The Master's U.)

Erick Chastain* (now Assistant Professor at U. Dallas)

Carlos Diuk (now Research Scientist at Meta)

Sergiu Goschin (now Software Engineer at Google)

Bethany R. Leffler (now Assistant Dean at Northeastern)

David LeRoux*

Lihong Li (now Research Scientist at Meta)

Christopher R. Mansley* (now Software Engineer at Bedrock Robotics)

Vukosi N. Marivate (now  Prof at University of Pretoria, Co-founder at Lelapa AI)

Ali Nouri (now Software Engineer at Google)

Brian Russell (now Lead Software Engineer at L3Harris Technologies)

Alexander L. Strehl

Thomas J. Walsh (now Senior Research Scientist at Sony AI)

Ari Weinstein (now Research Scientist at Ellison Institute of Technology)

Michael Wunder (now Software Engineer at Google)

Fancong Zeng

Former PhD Students (Duke)

Fan Jiang (now Developer at Virtu Financial)

Greg A. Keim* (now Research Engineer at Character.AI)

Michail G. Lagoudakis* (now Professor at Technical University of Crete)

Stephen M. Majercik (now Associate Professor at Bowdoin College)

Noam Shazeer* (now VP Engineering at Google Deepmind)

*=didn't graduate with me