Hi! I’m Anthony Francis, and I design intelligent machines and emotional robots, focusing on deep reinforcement learning for indoor robot navigation. My original research page http://www.dresan.com/research/ details my thesis work on contextual memory. More recently, I’ve focused on robotics, first emotional robotics and later robot navigation. More information can be found in the subpages below:
I am the founder of Logical Robotics, a consulting firm specializing in the design and construction of skilled, interpretable, social and efficient intelligent agents. My research involves organizing and promoting the Embodied AI Workshop, the premiere workshop exploring the science of machine learning applied to interactive worlds, and social robot navigation work such as the Social Navigation Symposium.
Until recently, I was a researcher (bio page, archived) for Robotics at Google, focusing on robotics for reinforcement learning and reinforcement learning for robotics. My work there involved making robot navigation more reliable using approaches that combine deep reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation, and “traditional” probabilistic motion planning approaches which were the snazzy new thing when I started my PhD work, and which still do the job pretty well now.
My PhD research focused on contextual memory: how implicit context helps us retrieve and use information more appropriately. This can include not just memory for facts, but memory for emotion: annotating experiences with the emotions they cause can be used to learn emotional responses that are appropriate for different situations.
My other research interests include programming language design, interactive fiction, natural language understanding, animal cognition, cognitive science, intelligent agents, and physics, particularly general relativity. For more information, check out the subpages, or read recent posts below:
Posts About Intelligence … Broadly Construed 🙂
[twenty twenty six day one six one]: home again home again jiggity jig
Back from the Embodied AI Workshop! And TIL (today I learned, though not the today of the blogging every day post) that “home again, home again, jiggity jig” isn’t originally…
[cvpr]: this feels like a 70’s bond villain headquarters
INT SOUNDSTAGE – CUBICLE FARM – LATE AT NIGHT Programmers scramble about, trying to meet a deadline. CODEFINGER watches as an industrial coding AGENT creeps closer and closer to BOND’s…
[cvpr]: michael, might i remind you goliath is invulnerable
“I know, KITT, but let’s try to take out his right front tire.” Technically it is possible to swing a stick at CVPR and not hit a self-driving vehicle, but…
[embodied ai seven]: it’s over!
You survived the Embodied AI Workshop and all you got was that lousy t-shirt! I’m promising myself not to over-complicate this post, so here’s the short story: it went well!…
The Embodied AI Workshop Starts … Now
Well … SOON. The Embodied AI Workshop starts in just under an hour at Room 107 at the Colorado Convention Center! Hope to see you all there, or you’ll all…
Announcing the Seventh Annual Embodied AI Workshop
SO! I am pleased to announce that the Embodied AI Workshop returns in its seventh year at the CVPR conference! No playing of spoons for the Sylvester McCoy fans –…
[twenty twenty six day four]: time to crash
Okay, today’s post was going to be a post about friends and family and the value of organizing dinners. Instead, I’d like to blog that it’s late, and I’m tired.…
The Lorentzian Argument and its Impact on Transgender Narratives
I’m working on a paper on “The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels” with my friend Kenny Moorman. We’re attempting to harmonize “scenes and sequels” from professional writing craft with…
now
The final session of the Advances in Social Robot Navigation Workshop at ICRA 2025 is happening NOW. It’s been a great conference so far, with lots of great talks and…
soon
Still at ICRA, and the Advances in Social Robot Navigation workshop is TOMORROW! Which I suppose means that it is good that I found the room. 🙂 https://socialnav2025.pages.dev Lots of…
