I am a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am a member of the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics and advised by Professor Roderic Grupen .

I joined UMass in Fall 2004, as a graduate student in MS/PhD program. I got my Masters in Computer Science in Spring 2007.

Before joining UMass, I obtained my Bachelor and Master of Science in Mathematics and Computing at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Here I worked on developing a Text-To-Speech synthesis system for Indian Languages at the Communication Empowerment Laboratory .

Interests

I am interested in addressing the problem of task based manipulation planning in autononomous agents by employing a reusable common sense skill base which grows incrementally over the life of the robot. The planner should be capable of creating high level behavior by composing behavior autonomously. I am further interested in showing how such a planner can also drive the robot to explore and improve its knowledge base by directing attention to places in its state space where a particular skill is less competent.

My previous work has been on the development of a knowledge representation evolving from the principles of embodiment where the agent represents the world in terms of its own ability to control environmental interactions.I am presently interested in showing how knowledge acquired in a domain general framework, can be used to support task-directed planning under uncertainty, in a way that organizes planning effort effectively with respect to the task objective. For a more detailed description, see research and publications.

Publications