Paul Schydlo

I'm fascinated by how the mind takes in information from our senses, specifically 2D retinal images, and extracts only what it needs to solve the task at hand. How it does so much with so little energy.

At the moment, I study how we represent this information and how we can apply some of the same principles in our perception algorithms.

Application scenarios cover the fields of human action prediction, intuitive physics, planning and other related prediction tasks.

Currently, I'm pursuing my Ph.D in joint supervision by prof. Katerina Fragkiadaki at the Machine Learning Department at CMU in Pittsburgh and prof. José Santos-Victor at the Institute for Systems and Robotics in Lisbon.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - R. Feynman

Research Interests

Computer Vision, Disentangled Representation Learning, Topological Representations, Self-Supervised Learning, Generative Models, Bayesian Learning, Language Grounding, Cognitive Robotics, Robotics

Publications

Anticipation in Human-Robot Cooperation: A Recurrent Neural Network Approach for Multiple Action Sequences Prediction

Paul Schydlo, Mirko Rakovic, Lorenzo Jamone, José Santos-Victor

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018

[paper]

Personal Projects

RLenv.directory: Index of 120+ open source reinforcement learning environments. RLenv.directory
Human Action Anticipation Framework: Flexible Tensorflow model for learning discrete distributions over future human actions. github.com/pschydlo/ActionAnticipation
Reinforcement Learning From Scratch: Implementation of reinforcement learning algorithms from tabular Q learning to PPO in PyTorch. Repository link TBA.

Teaching Experience

Lab Instructor Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School, Lisbon, 2019
Instructor Lisbon Data Science Starters Academy, Lisbon, 2018
Workshop Lead Machine Learning Academy, Lisbon, 2017
Lab Instructor Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School, Lisbon, 2017

Awards

Best National Master Thesis Portuguese Robotics Society, 2017
Academic Merit Diploma, 2012-2017
National Mathematics Olympics Semi-Final, 2006

Research Projects

Acticipate, EU Horizon H2020
SecondHands, EU Horizon H2020

Presentations

Anticipation in Human Robot Cooperation, SEEEP (Sino-European Engineering Education Platform) Doctoral Programs Workshop on Robotics and Interaction, IST, 2019

Education

2019 - Present Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

Machine Learning Department, Ph.D Co-Supervision by prof. Katerina Fragkiadaki.

2019 - Present Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Supervised by prof. José Santos-Victor and prof. Katerina Fragkiadaki from CMU

2015 Technical University Delft, Netherlands

M.Sc. Systems and Control, Erasmus exchange semester

2012-2017 Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

Integrated M.Sc. Electrical and Computer Engineering, major in Systems, Decision and Control