Hello, my name is Aidan Scannell and I am a postdoctoral researcher with interests at the intersection of machine learning, sequential decision making and robotics. My research aims at enabling autonomous agents to learn behaviours, such that they can learn to solve any task. I am particularly interested in controlling agents with natural language instructions and the challenges associated with developing a robotic foundation model which can generalise across tasks, objects and embodiments.

Bio:

I am a Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Joni Pajarinen’s Robot Learning Lab and Arno Solin’s Machine Learning Research Group. I obtained my PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Arthur Richards and Carl Henrik Ek. During my PhD I developed methods for controlling quadcopters in uncertain environments by synergising methods from probabilistic machine learning, stochastic differential geometry and reinforcement learning.