Guest: Ali Ayub, Post-Doctoral fellow at SIRRL at the University of Waterloo

Bio: I am a Post-Doctoral fellow at SIRRL at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn. 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 is highly inspired by neuroscience and focuses on lifelong learning to enable long-term autonomy for assistive robots. In particular, I focus on robot learning from a limited number of interactions with humans in a lifelong manner. With respect to applications, my research is applicable in different fields of robotics that require long-term autonomy, particularly domestic robots and home service robots. Overall the main goal of my research is to develop autonomous assistive robots that can continually adapt to the dynamic real-world environments to support their users in daily living.