Wenchao Li Receives Prestigious NSF Career Award
Wenchao Li (ECE, SE, CS) was awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to further his research on specification-guided imitation learning (IL). Li uses a combination of formal methods and machine learning to build safe and trustworthy autonomous systems. The CAREER award is a five-year grant that will support Li’s research in this area.
Imitation learning involves robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems learning from demonstrations by human agents or expert agents. However, issues arise because “Human demonstrations can be inadequate, partial, imperfect, environment-specific, or suboptimal in practice,” Li explains.
Through this NSF award, Li will develop a novel framework for the process of IL to be guided by theories and algorithms with formal specifications. His research will explore which types of specifications are appropriate for different scenarios and how to incorporate specifications into data-driven learning processes, such as IL.
Read more about his award here.