Stefanos Nikolaidis

Biography

Stefanos Nikolaidis is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and leads the Interactive and Collaborative Autonomous Robotics Systems (ICAROS) lab. His research draws upon expertise on artificial intelligence, procedural content generation and quality diversity optimization and leads to end-to-end solutions that enable deployed robotic systems to act robustly when interacting with people in practical, real-world applications. Stefanos completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and received an MS from MIT, a MEng from the University of Tokyo and a BS from the National Technical University of Athens. Stefanos has also worked as a research associate at the University of Washington, as a research specialist at MIT and as a researcher at Square Enix in Tokyo. He was recognized with an NSF CAREER award in 2022 for his work on "Enhancing the Robustness of Human-Robot Interactions via Automatic Scenario Generation." Stefanos' research has also been recognized with best paper awards and nominations from the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and the International Symposium on Robotics.