Lili Chen and Brandon Trabucco, Ph.D. students in the Machine Learning Department, have been named 2023 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellows by the Department of Defense (DoD).

Established by Congress in 1989, the DoD NDSEG Fellowship Program encourages students to enter graduate school programs and promotes the growth of scientists and engineers within relevant DoD research disciplines. Including Chen and Trabucco, 165 individuals received the 2023 NDSEG fellowship.

Chen's research focuses on building machine learning models that allow robots to generalize their behavior to a wide range of real-world scenarios and adapt to unfamiliar situations.

"I hope to scale up current approaches to robot learning by leveraging large-scale data sets and recent advances in generative modeling," Chen said.

Trabucco aims to develop broadly capable embodied agents that both understand dynamic 3D environments and adapt to changes in them.

"Deep neural networks have developed astounding capabilities in generating text, images, music and video as foundation models, but many of these models lack interactivity" Trabucco said. "My research focuses on making foundation models interactive so they can learn new tasks faster, make decisions alongside humans in the world and have intuitive interfaces."

Read more about the program in the official press release, or learn about the NDSEG fellowship on its website.