Shuijing Liu (刘水竞)

Welcome to my personal website! I’m a postdoc scholar in UT Austin Robot Perception and Learning Lab, advised by Professor Yuke Zhu. In 2024, I obtained my PhD from Human-Centered Autonomy Lab in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, advised by Professor Katherine Driggs-Campbell.

Previously, I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in May 2018. Before that, I was born and raised in Zhengzhou, China.

Research Interests

I’m excited about enabling robots to operate in unstructured human environments, such as our homes and offices. I consider human modeling, interaction reasoning, and decision making as essential capabilities of such robots. Thus, my research is at the intersection of robot learning and human-robot interaction. I use AI tools to develop fundamental learning paradigms for human-centered robotics problems. My research is inspired by and deployed in challenging real-world applications, including navigation in human crowds, autonomous driving, instruction following, and assistive robots for people with disabilities.
[CV] [Research statement]

My long term goal is to enable robots to interact and collaborate with people in daily life. I advocate for robot learning from the people, with the people, and for the people.

I’m open to research discussion and collaboration, please feel free to get in touch!

Outreach

For junior PhD/Master/undergraduate students and potential collaborators: I dedicate 30 minutes every two weeks to offer mentorship/advising/help, especially for students from underrepresented groups or whoever is in need. Topics include but are not limited to AI/robotics/HRI research, graduate school application, career development, life, etc. If you would like to chat with me, please fill this form to schedule.

News

• 08/16/2024: I started my postdoc at UT Austin RPL Lab! Also, I’m selected as an MIT EECS Rising Star in 2024!
• 05/23/2024: I passed my thesis defense! Big thanks to my advisor, my committee, and my colleagues in HCA lab!
• 01/21/2024: Our paper “DRAGON: A Dialogue-Based Robot for Assistive Navigation with Visual Language Grounding” is accepted to RA-L!
• 08/30/2023: Two papers in audio-vision robotics (poster) and long-horizon manipulation (oral) accepted in CoRL 2023!
• 01/2023: Three papers in crowd navigation and audio-vision robotics accepted in ICRA 2023!
• 01/10/2023: Please checkout the website and open-source code for our paper “Intention Aware Robot Crowd Navigation with Attention-Based Interaction Graph”.
• 01/03/2023: Our paper “Structural Attention-Based Recurrent Variational Autoencoder for Highway Vehicle Anomaly Detection” is accepted as full paper in AAMAS 2023 (Acceptance rate: 23.3%)! For details, please checkout our website and code.
• 11/28/2022: I passed my preliminary exam (also known as thesis proposal)! Big thanks to my advisor, my committee, and my colleagues in HCA lab!
• 06/16/2022: Our paper “Combining Model-Based Controllers And Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Traffic Simulation” is accepted in ITSC 2022!
• 05/2022–08/2022: Completed an applied scientist internship at Robotics and AI at Amazon!
• 01/21/2022: Two papers “Learning to Navigate Intersections with Unsupervised Driver Trait Inference” and “Off Environment Evaluation Using Convex Risk Minimization” are accepted in ICRA2022!
• 12/25/2021: Please checkout the open-source code for our paper “Learning to Navigate Intersections with Unsupervised Driver Trait Inference”.
• 03/25/2021: Our paper “Decentralized Structural-RNN for Robot Crowd Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning” is accepted in ICRA 2021! Also, checkout our code here!
• 06/30/2020: Our paper “Robot Sound Interpretation: Combining Sight and Sound in Learning-Based Control” is accepted in IROS 2020!
• 06/19/2020: Starting my PhD journey in HCA group!
• 09/28/2019: My personal website is live!

Miscellaneous

Navigating through an academic career is hard, especially after PhD graduation (i.e. you’re on your own). Here’re the quotes from senior colleagues that empowers me from time to time:

• “As you rise, many people will disapprove. Rise anyway.” – Prof. Heng Ji
• “People are asking, and I’m asking, what is my legacy? And I tell you, my legacy is my students. They worked hard, but they felt they were appreciated, and there was a sense of camaraderie and support for each other. I didn’t do it consciously, but I guess it came from my motherly instincts. And I’m still in contact with many of them—I worry about their children, the usual grandma!” – Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy (who’s also my academic grandma!)