STEM Shoutout: Dr. Lydia Tapia

Computer science professor chosen as a 2021 Women in STEM Award winner

Dr. Lydia Tapia, an associate professor in Computer Science was selected in June as a 2021 Women in STEM Award winner.

Her project is ”Learning Conserved Robotic Features.” 

The work looks at ways to transfer knowledge one robot has learned to a new robot.

“When machine learning is used to teach a robot a task, the process usually entails designing features to describe the problem, gathering an enormous amount of training data, and spending intensive computation time to learn a model. This proposal focuses on gathering preliminary data on general properties that reduce learning complexity by exploiting sub-components of learned structures that can be reused by related robotic systems. This reduces both the data and computation time required for learning, Tapia wrote in her proposal.