Shivam Aarya

Hey there! I'm Shivam, a Ph.D. student in the RIPL Lab with Zsolt Kira.

In my Ph.D., I want to transform how rapidly robot learning advances, matching the pace of AI. The laborious process of teaching robots new tasks remains one of the major bottlenecks holding robotics back. The diversity of robot embodiments, tasks, configurations, and environments makes this learning process especially difficult to scale. My approach is to make robot learning fully autonomous by eliminating human demonstrations, bridging the sim-to-real gap, and automating robot resets. Ultimately, I want to shift the focus from minimizing human effort to optimizing the cost and latency of robot learning.

Before starting my Ph.D., I earned an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins in three years, with two majors (Computer Science and Applied Mathematics & Statistics) and a minor in Robotics. I published in ICRA, IROS, and RSS with Prof. Tianmin Shu at JHU and Prof. Josh Tenenbaum at MIT. As a Research Assistant in MIT's CoCoSci Lab, I developed CogGym, a platform to standardize and host hundreds of online human-agent interaction studies.

Beyond research, I really enjoy building interactive and intuitive systems, which often pulls me into the startup world. I co-founded three student-led startups, two of which were funded by JHU's Spark Accelerator, and the third was supported by the Johns Hopkins Office of Undergraduate Research (HOUR).

If you're into AI, robotics, or just want to chat about cool projects, feel free to reach out!