Ali Ayub
email: a9ayub@uwaterloo.ca
CV | Google Scholar | Github
I am a Post-Doctoral fellow at SIRRL at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn and Professor Chrystopher Nehaniv. I graduated with a Ph.D. degree from REAL at The Pennsylvania State University, under the supervision of Professor Alan R. Wagner. Before joining Penn State, I completed my undergraduate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. I was also a part of the Global UGRAD program funded by USEFP and spent a semester at the University of Central Missouri during my undergraduate studies.
My research interests lie at the intersection of Machine Learning (ML), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and Cognitive Science. My research focus is to enable long-term autonomy for assistive robots in real-world environments. I develop continual learning techniques that can allow autonomous robots to learn from their users and then use the learned knowledge to assist users over the long term. These techniques are backed by rigorous testing in simulation and physical testing on robotic platforms with human users.
News
March 2024: Our paper on a human-centered view of continual learning has been accepted at ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)! (full text coming soon)
Jan 2024: Our work on interactive continual learning for long-term personalization was accepted to ICRA 2024!
June 2023: Our paper on CBCL-PR was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems!
June 2023: Three papers were accepted to IEEE ROMAN, 2023!
May 2023: New paper on continual learning through HRI: a long-term user study to understand human perceptions of a continual learning robot in repeated interactions.
May 2023: Our paper "Active Class Selection for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning" was accepted to CoLLAs 2023!
May 2023: Invited to talk about my current and past research on human-robot interaction on the TrainCheck podcast.
April 2023: Selected for the DAAD AInet Postdoc Fellowship.