We’re happy to announce that Nate Koenig successfully defended his PhD dissertation yesterday. You might not have known that, in addition to his work on Gazebo, Nate has been pursuing his Computer Science PhD in the USC Interaction Lab with his advisor Maja J Mataric’.

In his dissertation, titled “Robot Life-Long Task Learning from Human Demonstrations: A Bayesian Approach,” Nate enabled robots to learn goal oriented long-term decision processes from human demonstrations. The approach facilitated knowledge transfer between tasks, and online task modification. We’re honored to have another doctor on the staff at OSRF. Welcome back, Dr. Koenig!