CV

Education

• B.S. in Computer Engineering (Data Science and Information Processing), University of Texas at Austin (May 2022)

Undergraduate Courses: Operating Systems, Algorithms, Probability, Linear Algebra, Software Implementation and Design (Honors), Data Science Principles, Digital Image Processing, Digital Signal Processing

Graduate courses: Cybersecurity Law and Policy, Neural Computation, Digital Video Processing (Audited)

Work experience

• Production Engineer at Meta (July 2022 - Present)
  • On the PE Metaverse team. High level overview here
• Software Engineer at Diligent Robotics (Feb 2020 - April 2021)
  • Using Python and ROS to build new features for Moxi, a socially‐aware humanoid robot
• Production Engineering intern at Facebook (Summer 2021)
  • Built an end-to-end load testing system for Facebook Live infrastructure that can handle large scale traffic at high QPS in Rust
  • Used Scuba, ODS and Unidash to build a comprehensive monitoring system with detailed real-time visualization
• Research Assistant at the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab (Sept 2018 - April 2022)
  • Researched audio-augmented Imitation Learning and implemented object recognition algorithms under Dr. Andrea Thomaz. See publications
  • Conducted Learning from Demonstration robotics experiments using Python, TensorFlow, ROS, AWS, Mechanical Turk and Javascript
• Platform Engineering intern bp (Summer 2020)
  • Designed an optimal routing algorithm for shipping to minimize carbon emissions by 30%
  • Built a web interface hosted on Azure using Python, Flask and SQL while working in an Agile environment

Honors & Awards

• Gail and Howard Neal Endowed Scholarship (2021)
• bp Scholar (2019)

Publications

A Case for Leveraging Human Prosody for Robot learning

A. Saran, K. Desai, R. Lioutikov, A. Thomaz, and S. Niekum. A Case for Leveraging Human Prosody during Reward Learning. Workshop, 16th Annual Conference for Basic and Applied Human-Robot Interaction Research, March 2021.

Understanding Acoustic Patterns of Human Teachers Demonstrating Manipulation Tasks to Robots

A. Saran, K. Desai, M. Chang, R. Lioutikov, A. Thomaz, and S. Niekum. Understanding Acoustic Patterns of Human Teachers Demonstrating Manipulation Tasks to Robots. 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2022.

Leveraging Prosody as an Informative Teaching Signal for Agent Learning: Exploratory Studies and Algorithmic Implications

Extracurriculars

• Conference Volunteer at AAAI 2021
• Conference Volunteer at HRI 2021
• Logistics Director for Freetail Hackers (2019-2021). We organized HackTX and published a “How-to” guide for aspiring hackathon attendees here.