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:

My Research

Posts About Intelligence … Broadly Construed 🙂

now

soon

Embodied AI 6 Papers are due FRIDAY May 23rd AOE!

Advances in Social Robot Navigation @ ICRA 2025

embodied ai six coming in june …

[twenty twenty-five day ninety-seven]: the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it took place

[twenty twenty-four day one three two]: what?!

[twenty twenty four day one two five]: this is it

[twenty twenty-four day one two four]: last call for embodied ai papers!

[twenty twenty-four day forty-three]: neurodivergence by the numbers

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