About
Nick Walker makes robots easier for people to operate, teach and understand. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Andreea Bobu’s CLEAR Lab.
Nick earned his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he worked in Maya Cakmak’s Human-Centered Robotics Lab on making complex robot behaviors understandable. His projects there included balancing task performance against expressivity, automatically narrating what a robot is doing and helping remote supervisors see why a robot failed. 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, and he led the organization of the first Northwest Robotics Symposium.
Before grad school, Nick studied 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 and competed with the Austin Villa@Home RoboCup team, which placed 3rd in 2017. He was recognized as a Dean’s Honored Graduate.
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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