Dr. Rika Antonova

Biography

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, leading the Cambridge Resilient Autonomous Learning (CamRAL) Lab. Previously, I worked at Stanford University where I received the NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship and contributed to the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab. I completed my PhD on data-efficient simulation-to-reality transfer at KTH in Sweden, supervised by Danica Kragic. I interned at NVIDIA Robotics in Seattle and have also collaborated with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. I obtained my Master's degree while developing data-efficient methods for learning controllers for bipedal locomotion, alongside Akshara Rai and Chris Atkeson. During my time at Carnegie Mellon University, I was advised by Emma Brunskill and focused on data-efficient reinforcement learning. Prior to my academic career, I spent several years as a software engineer at Google in the Search Personalization group, particularly with the Character Recognition team, where I worked on the open-source OCR engine Tesseract. I am currently seeking talented mechanical and control engineers for postdoctoral opportunities related to novel robot hardware design. My research interests include robotics, reinforcement learning algorithms, data-efficient RL, active learning and exploration, and decision-making in scientific and environmental domains.

Research Interests

Experience