Fatma Faruq

fxf603 at cs dot bham dot ac dot uk
PhD Student (Department of Computer Science, University of Birmingham)

My advisers are Dr. Dave Parker, Dr. Nick Hawes and Dr. Tim Miller (University of Melbourne).I also work with Dr. Bruno Lacerda. I am supported by the Priestly Scholarship.

My research focus is on multi robot planning utilizing formal methods. I am also part of the Intelligent Robotics Lab.

I have an MSc. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University where I was part of the CORAL lab under Dr. Manuela Veloso. I have a B.E in Computer Engineering from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. After my masters I worked as a lecturer at NUST, teaching undergraduates introduction to programming. Before my masters I worked as a software developer at LMKR which is an oil and gas software compnany.

Projects

When to Coordinate - Learning Sparse State Interactions in Multi Robot Policies

For my masters' thesis I implemented a two layer Q-learning algorithm for Sparse Interaction MDPs and abstracted it to 3D space for the manipulation robot Baxter.(Here are videos of generated policies Video1, Video2)		 Policies in 3D for 2 robots

Robot Safety

During my masters I also implemented a provably safe version of the the Dynamic Window Approach for obstacle avoidance using ROS.(Here are videos of a very basic setup on a robot Video1,Video2)

Playing Tetris

For the adaptive control and reinforcement learning course we implemented a policy improvement algorithm that learned to play tetris. (Video)

Gesture Recognition using MEMS

For my undergrad final year project, my groupmate and I implemented a proof of concept for gesture recognition using a wireless sensor network and Hidden Markov Models.(Link to our project presentation)

Awards

Priestly Scholarship Recipient
Fulbright Scholar
Winning Team Code for Pakistan Islamabad Civic Hackathon 2016

Misc

During my bachelors, my team and I designed and fabricated an autonomous robot that could line track and place pegs in stands for a national competition.For the Systems Engineering course in my masters, I was part of a team that made an exhibit which was deployed in the Pittsburgh Children's Museum for 3 days where kids could race dummy robot cars.

I'm also interested in teaching kids robotics and was part of CMU-Scitech where we taught middle schoolers arduino and scratch programming. As a lecturer at NUST, I organized and conducted workshops on Lego Robot Programming for school children and was also part of the Theme Committee for the National Engineering Robotics Contest.