Andreea Bobu

I am an Assistant Professor at MIT in AeroAstro and CSAIL. I work at the intersection of robotics, mathematical human modeling, and deep learning. In my research, I study algorithmic human-robot interaction, with a focus on how robots and humans can efficiently arrive at shared representations of their tasks for more seamless and reliable interaction. I ground my work in experiments with robotic systems like assistive robot arms and in user studies with real human participants.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley with Anca Dragan. Previously, I was also a Research Scientist at the AI Institute and worked at NVIDIA in the Robotics Lab. I received a B.S. in Computer Science at MIT.

I am recruiting PhD students!

news

Jul 19, 2024

Organizing a workshop on "Robotic Tasks and How to Specify Them" at RSS 2024.

Jul 15, 2024
Jul 10, 2024

I gave a talk at the CMU RI RoboLaunch Speaker Series, an outreach program for promoting robotics and AI research and education.

Jun 4, 2024

I gave an invited talk at ETH.

May 13, 2024

Organizing a workshop on "Long-term Human Motion Prediction" at ICRA 2024.

Apr 29, 2024

I gave a guest lecture in MIT's course on Robotics: Science and Systems, a course that I took as an undergraduate student 9 years ago.

Mar 25, 2024

I gave a guest lecture in CMU's course on Interactive Robotics.

Dec 1, 2023

Our work on "Preference-Conditioned Language-Guided Abstraction" was accepted to HRI 2024!

Dec 1, 2023

Our work on "Aligning Human and Robot Representations " was accepted to HRI 2024!

Oct 18, 2023

Check out our new preprint where we discuss "Getting Aligned on Representational Alignment"!

Oct 7, 2023

I was awarded the Emerging Research Award at the International Symposium on the Mathematics of Neuroscience!

Jul 29, 2023
Jul 11, 2023

New paper accepted to CDC on "Diagnosing and Augmenting Feature Representations in Correctional Inverse Reinforcement Learning", where we propose a method for repairing feature representations to better generalize across states!

Jun 29, 2023

I accepted a visiting Research Scientist position at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute starting August 2023!

Jun 18, 2023

I gave an invited talk at the CHAI Workshop.

Jun 2, 2023

I gave an invited talk at the Stanford Robotics Seminar. Check out the talk here!

May 16, 2023

I accepted an offer to join the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the School of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) starting Fall 2024!

May 5, 2023

I published a patent with the NVIDIA Robotics team on a new concept training technique for machine learning based on our paper on "Learning Perceptual Concepts by Bootstrapping from Human Queries"!

Apr 24, 2023

New paper accepted to ICML, "Diagnosis, Feedback, Adaptation: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Test-time Policy Adaptation", where we propose a human-in-the-loop framework for robots to recover from distribution shift failures.

Jan 17, 2023

Giving an invited talk at the Microsoft Research Seminar Series.

Dec 9, 2022

Giving an invited talk at the Robotics Colloquium at UW.

Dec 5, 2022

Giving an invited talk at the New Trends in Aerospace Seminar Series at MIT.

Dec 2, 2022

New paper accepted to HRI, "SIRL: Similarity-based Implicit Representation Learning", where we enable robots to learn salient feature representations by asking humans to gauge how similar different behaviors are.

Dec 1, 2022

I gave an invited talk at the Robotics Seminar at Cornell.

Nov 28, 2022

I was invited to speak at University of Utah's CS 6960: Human-AI Alignment graduate course.

Nov 16, 2022

I gave an invited talk in the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) Lab at Georgia Tech.

Oct 21, 2022

I gave an invited talk at the Illinois Robotics Seminar at UIUC.

Oct 14, 2022

I gave an invited talk in the Intelligent and Interactive Autonomous Systems Group (ILIAD) Group at Stanford.

Aug 1, 2022

I am grateful to have been selected for the Rising Star in EECS Academic Career Workshop!

Jul 23, 2022

I gave an invited talk at the Workshop on Complex Feedback in Online Learning at ICML.

Jun 29, 2022

New paper accepted to IROS, "Teaching Robots to Span the Space of Functional Expressive Motion", where we enable people to efficiently teach robots expressive motions during task execution.

Jun 14, 2022

New paper accepted to Robotics and Automation Letters, "Learning Perceptual Concepts by Bootstrapping from Human Queries". In this work, we ask for human input to learn a low-dimensional variant of the perceptual concept, then use it to generate a larger data set for learning the concept in the high-dimensional space.

May 25, 2022

I gave an invited talk at Apple's AI/ML seminar.

May 16, 2022
May 13, 2022
Dec 12, 2021
Nov 16, 2021

I gave an invited talk at MIT's Interactive Robotics Group.