Ayah Ahmad

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Ayah Ahmad

Hi, I'm Ayah! I'm a Robotics PhD student at Georgia Tech, advised by Professor Maegan Tucker in the Dynamic Mobility Lab. My research interests broadly lie in the realm of biomechanics and exoskeleton control.

I received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2023. There, I worked under Professor Ken Goldberg on robotics projects ranging from robotic grasping and manipulation, to vision-language perception. I also worked with Professors Christopher Graziul and Margaret Beale Spencer at the University of Chicago, on computational social science and speech emotion recognition.

Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Github

Research

* indicates equal contribution

	The Teenager’s Problem: Efficient Garment Decluttering as Probabilistic Set Cover Aviv Adler, Ayah Ahmad, Yulei Qiu, Shengyin Wang, Wisdom C. Agboh, Edith Llontop, Tianshuang Qiu, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Thomas Kollar, Richard Cheng, Mehmet Dogar, Ken Goldberg Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR)*, 2024 paper This paper proposes a hybrid approach combining depth-based and segment-based methods to efficiently remove scattered garments from a surface.
	Lifelong LERF: Local 3D Semantic Inventory Monitoring Using FogROS2 Adam Rashid, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Letian Fu, Kush Hari, Ayah Ahmad, Kaiyuan Chen, Huang Huang, Marcus Gualtieri, Michael Wang , Christian Juette, Nan Tian, Liu Ren, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)*, 2024 paper / website Lifelong LERF is a method for efficient semantic monitoring using a mobile robot that optimizes a dense language and geometric representation of its surroundings.
	The Busboy Problem: Efficient Tableware Decluttering Using Consolidation and Multi-Object Grasps Kishore Srinivas, Shreya Ganti, Rishi Parikh, Ayah Ahmad, Wisdom Agboh, Mehmet Dogar, Ken Goldberg IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2023 paper / website The "Busboy Problem" addresses the problem of efficiently clearing tableware from a flat surface by using multi-object grasping.
	Bagging by Learning to Singulate Layers Using Interactive Perception Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Baiyu Shi, Roy Lin, Daniel Seita, Ayah Ahmad, Richard Cheng, Thomas Kollar, David Held, Ken Goldberg IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023 paper / website SLIP-Bagging addresses the problem of autonomous bagging by using Interactive Perception to grasp single layers of bags.
	Datastore Design for Analysis of Police Broadcast Audio at Scale Ayah Ahmad, Christopher Graziul, Margaret Beale Spencer ACM International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (Supercomputing), 2021 (SC21 ACM SRC Undergraduate 1st Place Award, ACM SRC Grand Finals Candidate) poster / abstract This paper describes preliminary work towards enabling Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) in an analysis of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) BPC by demonstrating the pipelined creation of a datastore to enable a multimodal analysis of composed raw audio files.

Teaching

Recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

	EECS 127: Optimization Models in Engineering [FA23] Tutor
	EECS 16A: Designing Information Devices and Systems I [SP23] Head Homework & Discussion uGSI, [FA22] Admin & Discussion uGSI, [SP22] Tutor [FA21] Tutor
	CS 61A: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [SP21] CSM Junior Mentor [SP21] Academic Intern