Ikigai: Roboticist-scientist hybrid across the physical and virtual automation stack — algorithmic theory and practice of AI, RL, ML, and control systems on automatons(read: robots).

Research snippet: AI is a general-purpose technology with potential for disruptive technological breakthroughs that may stimulate new (digital & real) economic value chains in society. Today, our scientific understanding of the fundamental algorithmic mechanisms needed to transform this emerging technology into provably safe and robust (embodied) biological systems and safety-critical physical infrastructure are far behind its empirical engineering performance. In this sentiment, I exert my scientific research inquiry on agentic embodied AI systems — with a particular emphasis on answers to big questions surrounding their safety, stability, robustness, reliability, and resilience (S23R) in safety-critical infrastructure. The topical angles of attack within my research stack encompass: distributed generalized Nash-equilibrium seeking games, diffusion sampling in infinite-dimensional spaces, robust policy optimization, reduced-order model and control of multi-arm and collaborative robots, representation learning in large observation spaces, autonomous c-space exploration, and Hamilton-Jacobi analysis for runtime assurance in complex autonomous systems (read: cyberphysical systems). Balanced and ballasted along the trajectories of these topical lines of inquiry, I am interested in runtime assurance tooling and orchestration mechanisms that imbue S23R guarantees in emerging agentic embodied structural systems. If you are interested in collaborating, please shoot me an email .

Research Chronology

• Principal Researcher and Founder, Stealth Startup (2025 – Present).
• Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Lab (NYC), (2021 – 2025).
• Adjunct Faculty, Brandeis University, Graduate School of Professional Studies, (2019 - 2021).
• Postdoctoral Researcher, The University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine (2019 - 2021).
• Research Intern (Robot Learning), Preferred Networks, Tokyo, Japan (Ended 2018).
• Mechatronics Intern, Amazon Robotics (Advanced Robotics Lab), Greater Boston, MA (2016).
• Student, The University of Texas at Dallas, School of Engineering (2014 - 2019).
• Visiting Student, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Medical Physics and Engineering (2014 - 2019).
• Student, The University of Sheffield, Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (Ended 2012/2013).

Select News Highlights

Talk Highlights

• Towards Ubiquitous Robotics Automation. The Robotics and AI Institute. Cambridge, MA. 09/25.
• State Representation in Reinforcement Learning. Google DeepMind Robotics, SF, CA. 08/25.
• System Identification for Planning in Reinforcement Learning. Wayve Technologies Ltd. London, UK. 08/25.
• Embodied Intelligence in Open Embodiments. Boston Dynamics, Inc. Waltham, MA. 08/25. Appendix.
• Robustness and Efficient State Representation in Open Embodiments’ Automation, META Reality Labs, SF. 07/25.
• Layered, hierarchical nonlinear control of soft robotic systems, McGill University Engineering/MILA. 11/24.
• On the Robustness and Convergence of Policy Optimization in Continuous-Time Mixed H2/H-infinity Stochastic Control, Yale University Engineering/CS Faculty, New Haven, Conn. 11/23.
• Dynamics from Pixels as Time Integrations of Neural Lie Group Homomorphisms, MSR Game Intelligence Group, Cambridge, UK. Fall 2023.
• Learning without Rewards, Microsoft Research Summit. Fall 2021.
• A Short Treatise on the Kinematics and Kinetics of Robots – Slides, MSR NYC. 2022.
• The Mathematical Foundations of Robotics, Brandeis University. 2021.
• Robot Manipulation, Planning and Control, Brandeis University. 2020.
• L1 Adaptive Control – Courtesy of Naira Hovakimyan. 10/1/2015
• Automating Treatment Planning in Radiation Therapy, Microsoft Research NYC, New York City. Winter 2021.
• Automating Treatment Planning in Radiation Therapy, Auris Health, Johnson & Johnson. San Francisco, CA, 2021.
• Soft Robots-based Position Correction Mechanisms in Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy. Open Robotics Foundation, Mountain View, CA, USA, 2019.
• Robotic Radiotherapy: Automating Position Correction in Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy, Department of Energy Resources Engineering. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, 2018.
• Robotic Radiotherapy: Automating Position Correction in Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy, Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, 2018.
• Minimax Iterative Dynamic Game, Department of Brain Robot Interface. Computational Neuroscience Labs, ATR, Osaka, Japan, 2018.
• Soft Robotic Modules as Position Correcting Mechanisms in Cancer RT, 3rd Entrepreneurship Forum & Start-up Competition, EFSC’17, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2017.
• Neural Networks and Adaptive Control, Preferred Networks Tech. Talk, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. Japan, 2018.
  

Mentoring Activities.

Previous interns, postdocs, and students include:

• Taylor Webb. Princeton Neuroscience PhD; UCLA Postdoc → MSR Postdoc, ‘24/25 → Assistant Professor, University de Montreal.
• Leilei Cui. MSR Intern, ‘22 → NYU Engineering PhD → Posdoctoctoral Scholar, MIT → Assistant Professor, Univ. of New Mexico.
• Abulikemu Abuduweili. CMU Robotics PhD student → MSR Intern ‘24 (co-advised by Elise van der Pol, and Naoki Wake) → Research Scientist, Reliant Robotics.
• Anurag Koul, Oregon State PhD, MSR Postdoc, ‘23-‘24 → Applied Scientist II, Amazon NYC.
• Shaoru Chen. Penn ESE PhD, University of Pennsylvania → MSR Postdoc (‘23-‘24) → LinkedIn Senior ML Engineer.
• Etiosa Omeike. Princeton ECE BS → MSR Undergrad Intern, 2023 → Yale CS PhD student (advised by Prof. Marynel Vazquez).
• Thomas Zhang, MSR Intern, ‘23. UPenn PhD Student advised by Prof. Nik Matni.
• Gilbert Bahati, Caltech MechE PhD Student (Advised by Prof. Aaron Ames).
• Haoxiang You. Yale MAE PhD Student. Advised by Prof. Ian Abraham.
• Harry Vuong. Brandeis University MS 2020/2021 → Robotic Systems Engineer, Universal Robots A/S.
• Harley Wiltzer, MSR Intern, 2023. McGill PhD Student advised by Profs. David Meger and Marc Bellemare.
• Adwait Kulkarn, 2017-2018 Masters intern → (VP of Smart Trailer Engineering, Drov. Tech, MN).
• Rachel Thompson, 2017 Plano High School → University of Texas as Dallas → MIT CSAIL undergrad → Brown University PhD.
• Ajith Venkateswaran, 2016-2017 Masters Intern → Amazon Robotics LLC → University of Texas at Dallas → Senior Software Engineer, Johnson & Johnson → SW Tech Lead (Embedded Automotive Platforms), Wayve.
• Blessing Kolawole, Undergrad Assistant. (CS PhD student, Tufts University).

Editorial/Community Services

• Co-Organizer, Microsoft Cortex Research Series, FY25, 2024 - 2025.
• Mentee Lead, (Microsoft) Technology and Research (T&R) Mentoring Ring FY25, 2024 - 2025.
• Co-Coordinator, Reinforcement Learning Discussion Group Series, Microsoft Research, 2023 - 2024.
• American Control Conference, Chair, Nonlinear Systems Session, Denver, Colorado, July 2025.
• IEEE Control and Decision Conference, Chair, Numerical Methods in Control, Milano, Italia, December 2024.
• Member, IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Committee on (i) Soft Robotics; (ii) Cognitive Robotics; (iii) Algorithms for Planning and Control; (iv) Automation in Health Care Management; (v) Aerial Robotics and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. 2023 - Present.
• Associate Editor, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshops, 2022-2023.
• Associate Editor, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020-2021.
• External Grants Reviewer, AI for Species Discovery, National Geographic Society, 2020 - 2021.
• Journal Reviewer: Automatica (IFAC – The International Federation of Automatic Control), IEEE Letters to Control Systems Society (L-CSS), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI), Institute of Physics (IOP): The International Journal of Biomedical Physics and Engineering (PhysMed), IEEE Access, Neural Computing and Applications (NCAA).
• Conference Reviewer: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Dynamic Systems and Control Conference – The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (DSCC), American Control Conference (ACC), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), IFAC – World Congress, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

Professional Activities.

• IEEE, Member.
• IEEE RAS, Robotics and Automation Society, Member.
• IEEE CSS, Control Systems Society, Member.

• AAPM: The American Association of Physicists in Medicine, Junior Member.
• ASTRO, The American Society for Radiation Oncology, Member.
• NYAS, The New York Academy of Sciences, Member.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of the KOMs

As often as I can get away from the lab, I like to ride my road bike. I ride rain or shine, hell or highwater -- whether it's in the parching heats of sultry Texas, or the blustering cold winds of the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard. States "bikeprint": MA, NH, CT, NY, NJ, PA, DE, FL, TX, IL, WI, IN, HI, WA. Below is a screenshot of my recent activities summary.

Recent Readings

Below are the books in my current reading list.

2025 Readings

• Now it can be told: The story of the Manhattan project – (General) Leslie M. Groves.
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation – Jon Gertner (H/T: Akshay!).
• The Demon of Unrest – Erik Larson (H/T: Julia Kirby for the rec!).
• Successful Negotiating: Letting the Other Person Have Your way – Ginny Pearson Barnes.
• On Natural Selection – Charles Darwin.
• Isaac Asimov’s Caliban – Rober MacBride Allen.
• How to avoid a Climate Disaster – Bill Gates.
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens.
• True Compass – Edward Kennedy.

Oldies and Goodies

• Knowing Mandela – John Carlin.
• The Startup Way – Eric Ries.
• Democracy in America – Alexis De Toqueville.
• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway.
• John Adams – David McCullough.
• The Federalist – Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – Doris Kearns Goodwin.
• No Ordinary Time, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II – Doris Kearns Goodwin.
• The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela – Edited by Sham Venter.
• Mandela, The Authorized Biography – Anthony Sampson.
• 1776 – David McCullough.
• Founding Fathers – Gordon Leidner.
• Managing Up – Rosanne Badowski.
• Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography – Richard Bellman.
• Advice for a Young Investigator – Santiago Ramon y Cajal.
• Richard Feynmann: A Life in Science – John and Mary Gribblin.
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
• Profiles in Courage – John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

This web presence was last updated on Wed, Nov 26, 2025.