Jishnu Jaykumar Padalunkal
Research: Learning from humans and few examples for embodied robotics
I’m a final-year PhD student at UT Dallas, working on robot learning with Yu Xiang at IRVL. I started as an MS student in Fall 2021 and switched to the PhD program after my first year.
🎓 I’m graduating in 2027 and looking for full-time research scientist positions in industry. If my experience brings value to your team, please reach out!
I work on making robots learn from minimal supervision — either few-shot examples (a few photos of an object) or input from humans (one demonstration video, a few iterations of guidance/correction). The work runs on real hardware, not just in simulation. My PhD thesis brings four such projects together: FewSOL (ICRA 2023), a few-shot object learning dataset; Proto-CLIP (IROS 2024), vision-language few-shot perception; iTeach (under submission), learning from human interaction and guidance; and HRT1 (under submission), training-free mobile manipulation from a single video.
news
| Jul 6, 2026 | Featured in the UTD Jonsson School’s coverage of its annual Faculty & Staff Awards Ceremony, recognized for the Dean of Graduate Education Dissertation Research Award 🎉Also featured by the Jonsson School and the CS Department  |
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| Jun 12, 2026 | Grateful to receive the competitive Dean of Graduate Education Dissertation Research Award at the University of Texas at Dallas for 2026–2027. |
| Jun 11, 2026 | My blog is now featured on the activities page. |
| May 7, 2026 | Spotted in UTD Jonsson’s ECS AI Days 2026 recap — where we demoed HRT1 🎉  |
| May 1, 2026 | Won the Best Poster Award 🏆 for HRT1 at AI Days 2026. |