Tewodros W. Ayalew

Email: tewodrosayalew [at] uchicago [dot] edu

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, advised by Dr. Matthew Walter at the Robot Intelligence through Perception Laboratory (RIPL) at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). My research explores unsupervised representation learning for robotics and reinforcement learning from in-the-wild human videos. I am driven by the goal of building generalizable robot learning systems that go beyond curated datasets and controlled lab environments, enabling transfer across tasks and embodiments. By grounding learning in real-world visual data, I aim to bridge passive video understanding with active robotic control. Prior to my PhD, I earned an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan, where I worked with Dr. Ian Stavness on unsupervised computer vision, and a B.Sc. in Software Engineering from Addis Ababa University.