I'm Kyle Vedder

In 20 years I want there to be robots that can effectively automate the mechanical aspects of high-quality elder care (e.g. fetching objects, changing sheets, cleaning the room). The US is on the verge of a large retirement of baby boomers and China faces a deeply troubling demographic cliff in 20 years, motivating the need for new, more scalable and cost-effective methods of providing high-quality elder care that does not compromise on outcomes for patients.
Background
I am a CS PhD candidate at Penn under Eric Eaton in the Lifelong Machine Learning group of GRASP Lab. Motivated by my goal of developing elder care robots, my research interests lie in the intersection of:
During my undergrad in CS at UMass Amherst I did research under Joydeep Biswas in the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab. My research was in:
I have also done a number of industry internships; I have interned twice at Unidesk (a startup since aquired by Citrix), twice at Google, and once at Amazon's R&D lab, Lab126 (where I worked on their home robot Astro). This summer I am joining Argo AI as a Research Intern under James Hays.
Updates
- Mar 1st, 2022: Submitted Sparse PointPillars to IROS 2022
- Jan 31st, 2022: Reviews from Sparse PointPillars ICRA 2022
- Sep 15th, 2021: Submitted Sparse PointPillars to ICRA 2022
- Jul 20th, 2021: Added project webpage for X*
- Jul 8th, 2021: Poster presented at Sparse Neural Networks on Sparse PointPillars
- Jun 14th, 2021: Workshop paper accepted as poster to Sparse Neural Networks: Sparse PointPillars: Exploiting Sparsity on Birds-Eye-View Object Detection
- Apr 27th, 2021: My WPEII Presentation: Current Approaches and Future Directions for Point Cloud Object Detection in Intelligent Agents
- Apr 14th, 2021: My WPEII Document: Current Approaches and Future Directions for Point Cloud Object Detection in Intelligent Agents
- Feb 11th, 2021: Blog post: Setting up
mujoco-py
for use with on-screen and off-screen rendering
- Nov 4th, 2020: Journal paper accepted to Artificial Intelligence: X*: Anytime Multi-Agent Path Finding for Sparse Domains using Window-Based Iterative Repairs
- Jul 23rd, 2020: Presentation: From Shapley Values to Explainable AI
- Jun 29rd, 2020: Demo: Penn Service Robots navigating around Levine
- May 8th, 2020: Term paper: An Overview of SHAP-based Feature Importance Measures and Their Applications To Classification