About Me

I am a second year doctoral student in EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at MIT. I am part of the Algorithmic Alignment Lab , advised by Professor Dylan Hadfield-Menell. I am broadly interested in AI (NLP, Vision, Foundation Models, Robotics) to help with interactions and alignment between humans and autonomous agents/systems for better decision making and reasoning for assisting humans with everyday tasks. I am interested in both enabling personalization to human preferences, while maintaining generalized agents. Previously, I graduated from Brown University in May 2023, where I double majored in Computer Science and Music, both with honors. At Brown, I did research in the Humans to Robots Lab (H2R) and Intelligent Robots Lab (IRL) at Brown, under research advisors Professors George Konidaris and Stefanie Tellex. I am also an active pianist and composer. If you would like to perform one of my compositions and request parts, contact me! In my free time, I like spending time with friends, watching movies, reading classics (Jane Austin!), musical activities, and karaoke! Contact: rachelm8[at]mit[dot]edu Resume Google Scholar

Publications

* denotes first author

R. Ma*, J.Qu, A.Bobu, D. Hadfield-Menell “Goal Inference from Open-Ended Dialog” in the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025. In Submission. arXiv

P.JK.Christofferson,R. Ma, A.Bobu, D. Hadfield-Menell “Learning to Search from Belief-Space Plans” in the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025. In Submission.

R. Ma*, D. Hadfield-Menell “Learning Human Preferences through Open-Ended Dialogue” in the Generative Modeling meets HRI Workshop at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024, Accepted. Runner Up Best Paper.

R. Ma*, L. Lam, B.A. Spiegel, A. Ganeshan, R. Patel, B. Abbatematteo, D. Paulius, S. Tellex, G. Konidaris, “Skill Generalization With Verbs” in International Conference for Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2023, Accepted. IEEE, arXiv

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2023-present)

2nd year EECS PhD Student

Brown University (2019-2023)

Sc.B. Computer Science with Honors ("Skill Generalization With Verbs")

A.B. Music with Honors ("Odyssey")

University of Toronto Schools (2013-2019)

Middle and High School Diplomas

Other Certifications

Licentiate Diploma in Piano Performance (2019)

Associate Diploma in Piano Performance (2016)

Associate Diploma (ARCT) and Licentiate Diploma (LRCM) are the highest academic standings awarded by the Royal Conservatory of Music Certificate Program