Biography

    I am currently pursuing the Ph.D. program in the Department of Computing Science under the supervision of Dr. Hong Zhang at the University of Alberta. My main research interests are in Robotics, Autonomous Driving, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision. I am involved in the Cooperative and Autonomous Driving (CAD) project to find methods to reach a higher level of operational safety in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Specifically, I am focused on the cooperative trajectory prediction problem, in which CAVs should predict the future trajectory of the agents in the traffic scene. The goal is to get more accurate predictions using vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) communication. This helps to have safer and more efficient motion planning for the CAVs.

    Previously, I studied my M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Sharif University of Technology. There, I was a member of the CEDRA research group, lead by Dr. Ali Meghdari, which is mainly focused on social robotics. I have contributed to developing a socially assistive robot named Arash, who is a companion robot for children with cancer. My rule in that project was developing and maintaining a ROS-based software framework to operate the Arash robot. Moreover, as a part of my master’s project, I have developed an augmented SLAM algorithm with a person-tracker module for safer navigation of our robot in populated environments. Meanwhile, during my 6-month visit from the University of Trieste in Italy, I worked on a robotics project under the supervision of Dr. P. Gallina. At this project, I have developed an optimized non-photorealistic rendering method for robotic painting.