Anand Balakrishnan

I am a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. I am advised by Prof. Jyotirmoy Deshmukh and part of the CPS-VIDA group. My research interests lie in the intersection of Formal Methods, Control Theory, and Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, I am currently working on projects involving:

• Developing methods to learn safe controllers for autonomous systems by incorporating formal methods techniques in reinforcement learning.
• Coordination between heterogenous robot teams to perform tasks efficiently.
• Enforcing safety specifications on controllers trained using reinforcement learning and/or contain deep learning components in them.

Before this, I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University at Buffalo in 2018, where I also worked with Prof. Karthik Dantu at the Distributed Robotics and Networked Embedded Systems Lab.