Ahmed Yesuf Nurye

I’m a PhD candidate in the Social AI Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I work on human-interactive robot learning (HIRL) as part of the Hybrid Intelligence Consortium. I’m supervised by Kim Baraka (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Herke van Hoof (University of Amsterdam).

My research focuses on making robots easier for people to teach. I work toward this goal by: 1) enabling robots to learn from naturally expressed human feedback, which may combine different teaching signals (e.g., demonstrations, corrections, and evaluations) and span different levels of task abstraction, from high-level task planning to low-level motion execution; 2) accounting for differences in people’s preferences and knowledge so that robots can adapt to individual users and learn from imperfect feedback; and 3) making this learning process more efficient by enabling robots to proactively participate in the teaching process and guide people toward providing feedback that is both useful for learning and easy to provide.

Before starting my PhD, I worked as a systems engineer at Scania and obtained my MSc in Robotics from Warsaw University of Technology.