2020 AAAI, HRI Pioneers, COVID19

This past February, I had the privliege to attend 2020 AAAI Conference in New York City. I was selected into the Doctoral Consortium, which serves as a workshop for promising PhD students in the greater AI community. I had a wonderful time meeting people from all walks of life and enjoying the world’s most cosmopolitan city. I got to sit in on all sorts of interesting talks on all sorts of topics in AI and Machine Learning. I even sawy Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCunn, and Yoshio Bengio recieve their Turing Awards. Pretty amazing!

My parents also came down that weekend. My Uncle, Charlie Mueller PhD, took us to see Book of Mormon. It was truly hilarious and I hihgly recommend seeing it. The ongoing theme was the bitter cold. It was as cold as the East Coast gets.

A month or so after the conference, I found out that I was also accepted into the HRI Pioneers workshop. This is a similar event as the AAAI Doctoral Consortium but more focused on an individual paper, and much more focused on my niche field of Human-Robot Interaction. Unfortunately, the conference was cancelled due to the COVID19 pandemic. I was supposed to go to Cambridge, UK so I was quite disappointed. What crazy times.

Due to CU Boulder shutting down in the late Spring and through the Summer, I was fortunate to be able to go to California for the summer. Amazing views driving across the country!

I also am no longer with the Deming Center Venture Fund as I resigned from my position as Portfolio Manager. I wanted to clear up commitments and focus on getting as much research accomplished this year as possible. It was a great experience and I wish the team the very best!