Group
Ph.D. Students
 |
Weiqin Chen I am a 4rd-year PhD Candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the supervision of Prof. Santiago Paternain. My research interests lie at reinforcement learning and optimization. My current research focuses on safe/constrained reinforcement learning, hyper-parameter optimization, control-based reinforcement learning, etc. website: https:weiqinchen7.github.io/ |
 |
Jonathan Fried I'm a student working towards a Ph.D. degree under advisory of Professor Santiago Paternain in the Department of Electrical Computer and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since January 2022. My research interests include optimization, classic control, robotics, human-robot collaboration, and reinforcement learning. website: https:jonathanfried.faculty.bio/ |
 |
Jonathan Light I am currently a Ph.D. student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY (RPI) and a visiting student at Caltech. Broadly speaking, I have an interdisciplinary background and am interested in the interplay between incentives/rewards (economics), algorithms (computer science), and learning (statistics). My current work investigates how foundation models, such as large language models, can be leveraged for sequential decision making, integrating ideas from reinforcement learning, test-time compute, and adaptive search techniques. I am particularly interested in how foundation models can enhance autonomous agents’ ability to plan, reason, learn, and generalize in complex environments through self-improvement and post-training adaptations. website: https:jonathanmli.github.io/ |
|
|
Shima Rabiei I am currently a Ph.D. student in Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). My research is mainly in reinforcement learning and optimization, particularly in the area of transfer learning. Before joining RPI, I earned an M.Sc. in Telecommunication Systems Engineering from the University of Tehran. My current research interests revolve around the theoretical foundations of reinforcement learning and optimization, and I am also a passionate learner of mathematics and physics e-mail: rabiei@rpi.edu |
 |
Randy (Jushan) Chen I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am supervised by Dr. Santiago Paternain. I do research in the intersection of AI and robotics. In particular, I study efficient and scalable multi-robot decision making and planning by leveraging state-the-the-art generative models, reinforcement learning, optimal control, and dynamic games. Previously, I finished both my B.S. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I was supervised by Dr. Negar Mehr, who is now an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. website: https:jushan-randy-chen.github.io/ |
Alumni
 |
Glory Justin My research focus is control and optimization with a minor in power systems. I am researching machine learning applications to power system optimization. One of these applications is the use of graph neural networks for power system security assessment. website: https:gloryjustin.github.io |