Research Areas

Optimization & Agentic AI

Exploration, algorithm discovery, reinforcement learning, decision-making, global optimization

Robotics & Hardware

Scalable simulation, physics-informed reasoning, mobile manipulation, edge computing

Co-evolution

Co-design of robot hardware and policy learning, automated search for AI accelerator chip design

Team

Headshot of Rika Antonova.
Rika Antonova   

Associate Professor

Global optimisation, co-design, reinforcement learning

Previously: Stanford, KTH, CMU, Google

Headshot of Martyna Stachaczyk.
Martyna Stachaczyk 

Postdoc
(Encode Fellow)

Neurotechnology, bioengineering

PhD: Imperial College London

Headshot of Hantao Zhong.
Hantao Zhong 

PhD Student

Multimodal sensing and robot mobility

MPhil: University of Cambridge
BSc: University of Edinburgh

Headshot of Jiayi Nie.
Jiayi Nie   

PhD Student

Co-design for AI accelerators

MSc: Imperial College London
BSc: University of Manchester

Headshot of Aviraj Newatia.
Aviraj Newatia    

PhD Student

Representation Learning and Simulation

BSc: University of Toronto

Headshot of Andy Zhou.
Andy Zhou     

PhD Student

Optimization and RL for dexterity

BA, MEng: University of Cambridge

Headshot of Austin Yang.
Austin Yang   

PhD Student

Hardware design and soft robotics

MSc: Stanford University
BEng: McGill University

Headshot of Yordan Tsvetkov.
Yordan Tsvetkov   

Research Assistant

Hardware co-design

BSc: University of Edinburgh

Headshot of Ruth Lu.
Ruth Lu   

PhD Student

Contextual reinforcement learning

BSc: MIT

Headshot of Abhijeet Rao.
Abhijeet Rao   

MPhil Thesis Student
(Scientific Computing)

Physics Simulation

BSc: University of Edinburgh

Past Visitors

Headshot of Leonard Pleiss.
Leonard Pleiss 

PhD Student at TU Munich

RL Exploration and Curriculum

Headshot of Aleksandar Taranovic.
Aleksandar Taranovic 

PhD Student at KIT

Vision-based multitask RL

Headshot of Josip Josifovski.
Josip Josifovski 

PhD Student at TU Munich

RL for sim-to-real robot control