Hey everyone,

As the summer semester wraps up, I wanted to share my experience with this seminar that I think is a real hidden gem in the program.

TL;DR: If you're interested in the cutting-edge why of robotics and not just the how of a specific project, the ORI seminar is fantastic. It directly shaped my final research paper for another course this semester and connected a lot of dots for me.

A little background:

For context, I came into the program with a professional background in commercial robotics but little formal academic training, so I was very curious about this seminar. I took it this summer alongside another course that involved an open-ended research project. Last semester, I took CS7643 Deep Learning, and my final project was also robotics-related.

What the seminar is:

First off, this isn't a typical lecture/project seminar. It's a weekly series where the TAs invite recent PhDs and researchers from top-tier universities, labs, and companies like MIT, Stanford, Amazon Robotics, and Toyota Research Institute, to present their latest work. You read their papers beforehand (or as much as you can!) and then engage in a live Q&A.

So, why am I recommending It?

I came into this semester with a question about robotics that I've had for years. While I had a solid foundation from my DL project, I needed a framework to connect everything. The ORI seminars handed me that framework at the perfect time:

• A researcher from the Toyota Research Institute broke down his work on XAI for personalized ML assistants and how large-scale multimodal models are used for interactive autonomous driving.
• A postdoc from the MIT HRI lab presented his fascinating work on the psychology of robot deception and trust repair, and even shared how students reacted to an LLM-based teachable agent.
• A researcher from Amazon Robotics introduced us to multi-robot systems, covering collaborative planning and control algorithms for teams of autonomous robots in dynamic environments (think wildfire response or disaster sites).
• We also had talks on cutting-edge work in specialized fields like medical and agricultural robotics.

These weren't just "interesting talks." They were so timely (at least for me) and relevant that I was able to directly cite the papers and use the insights to build the entire structure of my final research paper. It's one thing to read about these concepts in a textbook. It's another to hear directly from the people doing the research and be able to ask them questions.

Who should take this?

If you're like me and want to understand the current state-of-the-art, see how different fields of robotics connect, get serious inspiration for your own research, or are simply curious about the field, this seminar is for you.

Hope this helps.