Dr. Aidan Scannell, Ph.D.

Robotics & AI Researcher with over 6 years experience developing and implementing cutting-edge machine learning and robotics algorithms.

Helsinki

Research Expertise

probabilistic machine learning
reinforcement learning
robotics

About

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. I am a [Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence](https://fcai.fi/) postdoctoral researcher at [Aalto University](https://www.aalto.fi/en) in Joni Pajarinen’s [Robot Learning Lab](https://rl.aalto.fi/) and Arno Solin’s [Machine Learning Research Group](https://users.aalto.fi/~asolin/group/). I obtained my PhD from the [University of Bristol](https://www.bristol.ac.uk/) 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.

Publications

Trajectory Optimisation in Learned Multimodal Dynamical Systems via Latent-ODE Collocation

2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) / May 30, 2021

Scannell, A., Ek, C. H., & Richards, A. (2021, May 30). Trajectory Optimisation in Learned Multimodal Dynamical Systems via Latent-ODE Collocation. 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). https://doi.org/10.1109/icra48506.2021.9561362

Education

University of Bristol

Ph.D., Robotics and Autonomous Systems / June, 2022

Bristol

University of Bristol

MEng, Mechanical Engineering / June, 2016

Bristol

Experience

Aalto University

Postdoctoral Researcher / July, 2022Present

Received four-year funding to sit jointly in the Robot Learning Lab and the Machine Learning Group.

Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence Team Lead - Long-term decision making and transfer between tasks. / February, 2023Present

Leading a 6-person team of reinforcement learning researchers working on problems in the embodied AI domain.

University of Bristol

Teaching Assistant / September, 2018May, 2022

Teaching assistant for (i) Machine Learning, (ii) Robotic Systems and (iii) Intelligent Information Systems courses.

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