Toronto AI Robotics Seminar · University of Toronto

The Toronto AIR Seminar is organized by the Faculty and Students at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto for students across the world to present and interact with the Toronto CS Robotics Community.

Format: Opportunities for students to present their research and connect with peers from other institutions are inceasingly getting rarer. This phenomenon is sped up by low rate of oral/spotlights at top AI meetings and all events going virtual/online. This series aims to create such a platform for students to present their work in a friendly setting and get feedback and hopefully build new collaborations and network.

As a guiding principle, all speakers in these talks are first authors or co-authors intimately familiar with the work to field questions at every level of detail.
Unlike job talks, we usually prefer that speakers focus on a couple of main papers/ideas rather than present a full arc of their recent work.
Usually talks range from 30-35 mins (rarely going upto 45 mins), with the remaining time for Q&A and discussions.
We aim to have time for in-depth discussions with each speaker to discuss potential research directions and want to strive a balance between talks and collaborative discussions.

Logistics

We meet from 1030 to 1130 EST on Mondays. See in other time zones
The meetings will be hosted on youtube with hosts/presenters using zoom (internal UofT presenters will also come to the campus at Mississauga).

Subscribe to our list to be notified of upcoming talks:

Past talks are also available on our YouTube Channel.

Fall 2021 Schedule

Speaker	Affiliation	Date	Topic
Tabitha Lee	Carnegie Mellon University	October 25, 2021	Causal Reasoning in Simulation for Structure and Transfer Learning of Robot Manipulation Policies
Lukas Brunke	University of Toronto - UTIAS	November 1, 2021	Safe Learning in Robotics: From Learning-Based Control to Safe Reinforcement Learning
[tba]

Contact

If you have any questions, kindly email the current organizers:

Previous iterations

Winter 2021 Schedule

Speaker	Affiliation	Date	Topic	Recording
Ali Harakeh	University of Toronto	February 12, 2021	Bayesian Detection	link
Hazel Doughty	University of Amsterdam	February 19, 2021	Action Modifiers: Learning from Adverbs in Instructional Videos	link
Joonho Lee	ETH Zürich	February 26, 2021	Anymal Learning	link
Samarth Brahmbhatt	Georgia Tech, Intel	March 5, 2021	Grasp contact between hand and object & associated datasets	link
Maria Bauza	MIT	March 12, 2021	Tactile Localization
Daniel Seita	UC Berkeley	March 19, 2021	Deformable Object Manipulation
Krishna Murthy	Mila	March 26, 2021	GradSLAM
Michelle Lee	Stanford	April 9, 2021
Georgia Chalvatzaki	TU Darmstadt	April 16, 2021

Fall 2020 Schedule

Speaker	Affiliation	Date	Topic	Slides	Recording
Kevin Xie / Homanga Bharadhwaj	University of Toronto	Jan 22, 2020	Skill Transfer via Partially Amortized Hierarchical Planning
Carolyn Matl	UC Berkeley	Dec 11, 2020	Sim-To-Real from Sound / Material Properties for Robotic Tasks		link
Zongyi Li	Caltech	Nov 20, 2020	Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric PDEs	link	link
Anirudh Goyal	Mila	Oct 23, 2020	Recurrent Independent Mechanisms	link	link
Rika Antonova	KTH	Oct 9, 2020	Analytic Manifold Learning	link	link
Ron Dorfman	Technion	Sept 25, 2020	Offline Meta RL	link	link
Ahmed Qureshi	UCSD	Sept 18, 2020	Motion Planning Networks	link	link
Yana Hasson	INRIA	Sept 11, 2020	Hand-Object Reconstruction	link	link
Yunzhu Li	MIT	Sept 4, 2020	Koopman operators for model-based RL	link	link