Nan Rong

Computer Science Department, Cornell University

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I am currently a postdoctoral associate at Computer Science department, Cornell University. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in May 2016 under the supervision of Joe Halpern. My research is centered on artificial intelligence, robotics, decision-making, algorithms, and game theory.

Before coming to Cornell, I worked as a research assistant with David Hsu and Lee Wee Sun for a year at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, National University of Singapore, working on partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) optimizations.

You can find my CV here. My email is rongnan@cs.cornell.edu.

Publications

  1. MDPs with unawareness in robotics, Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI 2016), 2016, pp. 627-636, with J. Y. Halpern and A. Saxena. [pdf]
  2. Budgeted learning with unawareness, submitted, with J. Y. Halpern.
  3. MDPs with unawareness, with an application, submitted to Artificial Intelligence, with J.Y. Halpern and A. Saxena. [pdf]
  4. Cooperative equilibrium: a solution predicting cooperative play, submitted to Games and Economic Behavior, with J. Y. Halpern.[pdf]
  5. Learning in the Presence of Unawareness, PhD Thesis, 2016 [pdf]
  6. Towards a deeper understanding of cooperative equilibrium: characterization and complexity, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2013), 2013, pp. 319-326, with J. Y. Halpern. (Best Student Paper Award Nomination) [pdf]
  7. MDPs with unawareness, Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI 2010), 2010, pp. 228-235, with J. Y. Halpern and A. Saxena. [pdf]
  8. Cooperative equilibrium, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), 2010, pp. 1465-1466, with J. Y. Halpern. [pdf]
  9. Motion planning for people tracking in uncertain and dynamic environments, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Workshop on People Detection and Tracking (ICRA 2009), pp. 46-53, 2009, with Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay, Marcelo Ang, David Hsu, and Wee Sun Lee. [pdf]
  10. A point-based POMDP planner for target tracking, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2008), 2008, pp. 2644-2650, with D. Hsu and W.S. Lee. [pdf]
  11. What makes some POMDP problems easy to approximate? Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007), 2007, pp. 689-696, with D. Hsu and W. S. Lee. [pdf]
  12. Accelerating point-based POMDP algorithms through successive approximations of the optimal reachable space. Technical Report TRA4/07, National University of Singapore, School of Computing, 2007, with D. Hsu and W.S. Lee. [pdf]

Demos

  1. A humanoid robot learning to walk on itself using the MDPU model and the URMAX algorithm we designed (video here).
  2. Image Not Available Image Not Available Image Not Available Image Not Available A forward gait.
    Image Not Available Image Not Available Image Not Available Image Not Available A backward gait.
  3. Autonomous RC Car Drifting (video here).

Honors and Awards

  1. Best Student Paper Award Nomination, Paper: "Towards a deeper understanding of cooperative equilibrium: characterization and complexity" at the 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2013)
  2. Selected participant and presenter at Rising Stars in EECS Workshop 2013, MIT
  3. Analysis and Design of Algorithm Book Prize, Singapore-MIT Alliance, 2006
  4. Singapore-MIT Alliance Graduate Scholarship, Singapore-MIT Alliance, 2005 - 2006
  5. Commencement Award (second top student of B. Comp in Computer Engineering), National University of Singapore, 2005
  6. French Language Immersion Award, French Embassy & National University of Singapore, July 2003

Professional Service

  1. Reviewer for the 24th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015)
  2. Reviewer for the 28th AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2014)
  3. Reviewer for IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots & Systems (IROS 2012)
  4. Reviewer for the 27th Int. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML 2010)
  5. Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO 2010)

Invited Talks

  1. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Workshops (Bayesian Modeling Applications Workshop) (UAI2016 - Workshops), June 2016
  2. UCLA, Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy, July 2016
  3. Vicarious, July 2016