About
Nick Walker earned his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he worked in Maya Cakmak’s Human-Centered Robotics Lab. His research seeks to reduce the difficulty of making robots that people can understand by augmenting existing behaviors based on models of human inference. During his PhD, he studied problems balancing the tradeoff between task performance and expressivity to how to automatically narrate complex robot behaviors, and he has published results in numerous IEEE and ACM scholarly conferences. In 2022, Nick interned with Claudia Pérez D’Arpino at Nvidia’s Seattle Robotics Lab to work on intuitive interfaces for telemanipulation. A part of this project won an HRI Best Paper award in 2024. His research was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. While a student, Nick led the organization of the first Northwest Robotics Symposium.
Nick earned a Bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin where he worked on service and domestic robots in Peter Stone’s Building Wide Intelligence project. He was part of the Austin Villa@Home RoboCup team that placed 3rd in 2017 and won best-poster in 2018. Nick earned honors as a Polymath in the College of Natural Sciences, was recognized as a Dean’s Honored Graduate and was selected to speak at commencement.
Nick is also a photographer and runner. He directs the annual Drumheller Marathon and Light Rail Relay endurance running events in Seattle organized under Race Condition Running. His experiences with urban running have led him to contribute writing to The Urbanist.
Contact
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