Artem Molchanov

About

I'm a researcher in robotics and machine learning. I have a position as a Senior Deep Learning Scientist in the Autonomous Vehicles division at NVidia. I completed my Ph.D. in the Robotics Embedded Systems Laboratory (RESL) at the University of Southern California under supervision of Gaurav Sukhatme.

My research interests are focused on systems that have to operate and adapt under sparse, noisy and incomplete information. Most relevant to robotics, this scenario requires careful leveraging of indirect sources of information to make intelligent decisions, such as priors acquired through simulation, additional sensors indirectly (nontrivially) measuring relevant quantities, communication with other agents, different indicators of task progression. Lately I have been working in the areas of reinforcement and imitation learning, where I am investigating learning under sparse rewards and a sample efficient adaptation to new tasks by combining simulation, automatic task curriculum and meta learning. I applied my research to a variety of platforms including quadrotors, robotic arms, underwater vehicles and autonomous cars. A more broad overview of my latest research direction can be found here.

During my Ph.D program at RESL I did a number of internships at:
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) (Summer, 2019) where I was part of the Robotics team and collaborated with Franziska Meier and Edward T. Grefenstette working on the project of meta-learning for RL;
Nvidia (Summer, 2017) where I was part of the Learning & Perception Research team lead by Jan Kautz and collaborated with Stan Birchfield and Jonathan Tremblay working on the project of curriculum learning for RL and the project on learning human-readable plans from demonstrations;
Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab (Summer, 2016) with the research team lead by Lutz Junge and collaborated with Premkumar Natarajan while working on neural network compression;
Blue River Technology (Summer, 2015) where I worked under supervision of Marci Meingast on improving a vision system of the lettuce thinning bot using deep learning.
Besides that, together with Vadim Butakov and Rob Simpson, I worked on a startup called Swerve.ai targeting improvement of safety in autonomous driving by enabling handling at the limits of friction.

I studied Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). In May 2010, I graduated cum laude obtaining Master of Engineering degree at BMSTU. In May 2015, I received Master of Computer Science degree from USC where I later defended my Ph.D in May 2020.