Pratham Gandhi

@UChicagoCS & @UChi_Economics alum. Interested in safe collaborative robotics. Currently @zipline

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

“Look at this graphhhh 🎶”

[Keller Cliffton @Keller]

Zipline update, from our command center

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

there’s research showing that if you’re tired/sad, hills literally look steeper. basically your emotional state changes how you see the physical world. a frustrated kid is gonna "see" a robot tutor’s encouraging movement as annoying, so robot has to adjust just to stay "neutral"

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

Thinking about what robots look like in educational/household settings. VLAs use just scene/language to predict actions; so a frustrated child and an engaged one receive broadly the same behavior. I wonder if we can also somehow condition on users' emotional states

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

something like "vision-language-emotion-reaction". will try to implement a concept of this on a reach mini, bc the action space is entirely expressive anyway.

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

He recommended reading Karen Leung’s work on Signal Temporal Logic Computational Graphs - my understanding is this is using backprop to bake formal safety rules directly into neural planners - will definitely check it out

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

Really enjoyed @PatrikarJay’s talk today @GRASPlab. Couple salient points:

1) Capital R vs H HRI (& academic vs industry HRI). At what point does just reactively avoiding human in front of you beat proactive reasoning about intent and future distribution of every agent’s actions

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

2) after years of “classical” safety research on LLMs we just used RLHF. What’s beyond classical (control barrier fns etc) for robots? Besides being less deployable and too conservative, classical “safety” isn’t well defined, varying even between semantically similar situations

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) was lowkey just idea farming modular autonomous warehouse robotics.

[Jordan McGillis @jordanmcgillis]

this is what peak male performance looks like

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@TheOldCootBiker @karunchandhok because of earnings release, nothing to do with hamilton

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@cameronlow22 @instagram @Facebook Congratulations Cameron that’s so well deserved!!

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@markfern05_ Thanks so much bro!

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

Had a lot of fun writing this post about a project I worked on for UChicago TechTeam last quarter!

UChicago friends: If you're interested in civic tech, South Side non-profits, tech consulting, software development, or more... join TechTeam! Link in post

https://t.co/l1VoGp8aFV

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@abhixnav1 Yes bro ur absolutely kingly 👑 keep learning and growing there are huge things in ur future 🙌🏽

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@jjjjmr1 @Google You’d be surprised at how large their search competitors’ collective market share actually is (~10+%). Probably bc of Bing coming as default on Windows, so Google needs to get those ppl to switch over I guess

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@AstroWusain Lightweight, quick, easy, don’t need GUI (think working on remote machine etc), *universal*, and customizable + utilitarian beyond belief if you know how to do it right

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@IamSpencerKahn Don’t worry bud, can confidently say ur not missing out on much 😂

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@karunchandhok And he does have the French nationality going for him... a Grosjean, Ocon, and Renault team seems like a match made in heaven if you ask me

[Pratham Gandhi @prathgan]

@karunchandhok Grosjean?... They might want someone with a lot of experience who can develop their '22 car for them while not demanding a super high salary after they sunk so much money into Dan