Journey
Conferences, internships, and academic milestones
A record of the places where I have studied, worked, and attended research events, from Lebanon to Penn and visits to Japan and Europe.
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Intelligent Vehicles Symposium
Detroit, Michigan, USA
I joined IV 2026 for autonomous vehicle research and the Roboracer competition, where we hosted 14 teams. Our paper on nonplanar MPC with recursive sparse Gaussian process dynamics also appeared at the symposium.
The Roboracer community at IV 2026. -
ICRA 2026
Vienna, Austria
I helped organize the Roboracer competition at ICRA, bringing together 200 participants and 30 teams from more than 12 countries.
Teams and organizers gathered at the ICRA 2026 race track. -
MAD-Games at ACC
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
I helped with the third Workshop on Multi-Agent Dynamic Games at ACC. The workshop brought together researchers working on game theory, control, and learning for autonomous agents that interact with one another.
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ICRA 2025
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
I helped organize the Roboracer competition in Atlanta, with 26 teams taking part. This ICRA also included our workshop paper on zero-shot context identification for friction estimation.
The ICRA 2025 Roboracer group photo. -
CDC 2024
Milan, Italy
I traveled to Milan to help organize the Roboracer competition at the Conference on Decision and Control. Twelve teams took part in the physical racing competition.
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ICRA 2024
Yokohama, Japan
I returned to Yokohama for ICRA, helping organize the Roboracer competition. Our PoseINN paper on visual pose regression and localization was also part of the RoboNeRF workshop.
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Beginning my PhD at Penn
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
After completing my MSE in Robotics, I began my PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering with Rahul Mangharam. My research focuses on data-driven safe iterative control, with graduation expected in May 2028.
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A summer at TIER IV
Tokyo, Japan
As a controls intern at TIER IV, I worked on steering system identification, nonlinear MPC, and a reformulation of Autoware’s obstacle-avoidance planner to reduce computation time.
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IFAC World Congress
Yokohama, Japan
During my summer in Japan, I attended the IFAC World Congress. Our paper studied ensemble Gaussian processes for autonomous driving across surfaces with different friction.
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From Lebanon to Penn
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
I moved to Philadelphia for the MSE in Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania. I completed the degree in May 2023, before continuing into the PhD program.
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Robotics and embedded systems
Lebanon
After my undergraduate degree at AUB, I worked as a mechatronics engineer at Band Industries on embedded software and control for Roadie 2 and Roadie 3. I also worked part-time in the Robotics and Automation Lab at AUB with Professor Imad Elhajj on human-robot interaction and culminated in our paper which was presented at IEEE RO-MAN 2023.
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Band Industries
Montiverdi, Lebanon
I worked on the Roadie robotic guitar tuners, developing interface software for Roadie 2 and a motor-position controller for Roadie 3.
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A summer at UC Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA
While studying at AUB, I spent a summer studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley.