Professional Summary
Education
Visiting PhD Student, Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering
2022–2023
Monash University
PhD Electrical & Computer Engineering
2017–2023
University of Waterloo. Advisors: Prof. Dana Kulić and A/Prof. Rob Gorbet
M.Eng. Computer Application Technology
2014–2017
China University of Mining and Technology
B.Eng. Computer Science and Technology
2010–2014
China University of Mining and Technology
Interests
My research on human-centered robot learning is organised around three interconnected themes:
Foundations of Deep Reinforcement Learning — Understanding multi-step methods, memory architectures, and value estimation in partially observable environments (Neural Networks 2026, IROS 2021, ICPR 2020).
Preference Learning for Robotics — Enabling robots to learn from human preferences rather than hand-crafted rewards, with applications to interactive systems and assistive manipulation (ACM THRI 2021, ongoing work on patchable preference learning).
Real-World Deployment & Human-Robot Interaction — Translating learning algorithms to physical robots and large-scale public installations, including the Royal Ontario Museum deployment with 60,000+ visitors and partnerships with Boeing Research and Suburban Connect.
Teaching — Co-designed and co-taught the Reinforcement Learning and Human-Robot Interaction sessions of Monash University’s ECE4078 Intelligent Robotics unit (Semester 2, 2026).
Final Year Projects — Supervised 15 undergraduate students across 5 projects (2025–2026) on preference learning, deep reinforcement learning, VR-teleoperated dexterous grasping, and humanoid locomotion safety.
PhD co-supervision (Monash University) — Jin Siang Ong (perception-aware shared autonomy for fragile-object manipulation, RO-MAN 2026) and Emmanuel Fashae (interpretable models of human organisational preferences, HRI 2026).