Nishanth Kumar (@nishanthkumar23) / X

Nishanth Kumar

412 posts

Nishanth Kumar

@nishanthkumar23

Research @Meta Robotics Studio. Ph.D. @MIT_LISLab. Formerly @AIatMeta., @NVIDIAAI, @rai_inst, @vicariousai and @uber; Sc.B. @BrownUniversity.

Cambridge, MA

Joined July 2015

Pinned
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Jun 3
Life update: after finishing up my PhD at @MIT_LISLab @MIT_CSAIL, I'm excited to join the Robotics Studio team at @Meta as a Research Scientist! I feel lucky to get to work with a team full of exceptional colleagues committed to pushing the boundaries of intelligent robots. P.S:
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Nov 25, 2023
There was a lot of good and interesting debate on "is scaling all we need to solve robotics?" at #CoRL23. I spent some time writing up a blog post about all the points I heard on both sides: nishanthjkumar.com/Will-Scaling-S…
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Mar 28, 2021
Life Update: I'm excited to say that I'll be joining one of my dream Ph.D. programs @MITEECS in the near future! I can't wait to work on making robots smarter with the amazing people @MIT_LISLab and @MIT_CSAIL more broadly! 🤖
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Feb 11, 2022
Super excited to finally release something I've been working on for a while now! PGMax is a new #JAX-based framework that aims to make it easy to build and run inference on probabilistic graphical models (PGM's)!🧵👇:
Vicarious
@vicariousai
Feb 11, 2022
Want automated, differentiable, message-passing inference for large graphical models and probabilistic programs? PGMax can create an efficient implementation for you, while being end-to-end differentiable & running seamlessly on CPU, GPU and TPU! Check hubs.la/Q013Xp8v0
GIF
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Feb 23, 2024
Can we get robots to improve at long-horizon tasks without supervision? Our latest work tackles this problem by planning to practice! Here's a teaser showing initial task -> autonomous practice -> eval (+ interference by a gremlin👿)
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Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Nov 8, 2023
Ever heard about "Bilevel Planning" or "Task and Motion Planning", but been unsure what those words mean? Ever wanted a gentle intro to these methods so you can just understand what's going on? Our new blog post might help! lis.csail.mit.edu/bilevel-planni…
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Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Jun 8, 2024
Mini life update: I’ll be interning at @NVIDIARobotics in Seattle this summer. Excited to work with @CaelanGarrett and others on combining planning, learning, and foundation models for real world robots 🤖!
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Aug 17, 2022
I'm excited to release a preprint of my first first-author work during my PhD! (paper: arxiv.org/abs/2208.07737, video: youtube.com/watch?v=FRb6nU…) 🧵👇
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Oct 1, 2021
Had a really cool experience @MIT_CSAIL today: I got to meet Prof. Gerry Sussman and ask him if it's really true that Marvin Minsky once asked him to essentially solve most of #ComputerVision in a summer when Sussman was an undergrad. 1/3
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
May 9, 2021
Small Update: After graduating from @BrownUniversity last week, I'll be a summer intern @vicariousai before starting my PhD! I'm so excited to learn from incredible researchers like @dileeplearning and contribute to the mission of deploying AI-powered robots everywhere 😀
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Nov 8, 2023
Ever wanted to train your robot in one house but zero-shot generalize to a similar task in a *different* house? Our #CoRL2023 paper learns symbolic operators from demos, then leverages TAMP at test-time to zero-shot new tasks, like the challenging BEHAVIOR-100 task below! (1/n)
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Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Feb 8, 2024
I’ve been an avid reader of the MIT grad blog for a while; it was a dream come true to get the chance to contribute to it :)
MIT GradLink
@MITGradStudents
Feb 8, 2024
"How to train your robot 🤖 Cool research is built on a series of rather uncool moments." On the Grad Blog, Nishanth K. writes about coding (and cheering) for Pluto as it picks up cubes. Read: oge.mit.edu/how-to-train-y… @MITEECS @GSAEECS
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Apr 6, 2024
I may be biased, but @tomssilver’s thesis defense on Neurosymbolic Learning for Robots is probably the best one I’ve ever been to! Getting to work with and learn from Tom is one of the best strokes of luck I’ve ever had 😊
Tom Silver
@tomssilver
Apr 6, 2024
I defended my PhD @MITEECS this week! Thanks to everyone who came out. And thanks especially to @nishanthkumar23 who not only managed the Zoom, but also got me this amazing gift…
Nishanth Kumar
@nishanthkumar23
Sep 17, 2020
This is the first major project I got involved with and was a blast to work on! Check it out 😀
Stefanie Tellex
@StefanieTellex
Sep 17, 2020
Teach a robot to perform complex actions with a Mixed Reality headset! Check out our IROS 2020 paper! h2r.cs.brown.edu/action-oriente…