Biography
Raunak is a postdoctoral research associate at the Oxford Robotics Institute. His research broadly focuses on decision making under uncertainty for autonomous systems. His postdoctoral work is sponsored by the Embodied Intelligence grant (https://ori.ox.ac.uk/news/programme-grant/) where he is investigating techniques from Markov Decision Processes and Formal Verification to solve robotics mission planning problems, and techniques from metacognition and learning from demonstration to enable effective robot human collaboration in shared autonomy systems.
Before joining the Oxford Robotics Institute, Raunak obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021, where he was a doctoral researcher at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab. His dissertation research focused on autonomous driving where he used techniques from deep reinforcement learning and system identification to learn driver models from human demonstrations. At Stanford, Raunak was a teaching assistant for courses on Decision Making under Uncertainty, and Optimization.
Raunak has received M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2017 and 2016, respectively. During his master's studies, Raunak was a graduate researcher at the Cognitive Engineering Center. His master's thesis work investigated task allocation between human and automated air traffic systems for NextGen Air Traffic Control. Raunak received the B.Tech. (with hons.) in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2013, with a minor in Electrical Engineering.
