Jim Neidhoefer

Bio: Jim is a research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, working with Professor Chuchu Fan in the REALM lab and Professor Nick Roy in the RRG lab. His research spans methods that enable autonomous planning agents to generate valid environmental abstractions through their own sensorimotor experiences. This includes neuro-symbolic approaches for creating and grounding symbols for actions and concepts, probabilistic techniques for quantifying hard-to-observe environmental features, and approaches for automatically inducing and optimizing action models.
His previous work focused on the design, fabrication, and flight testing of unmanned aircraft with AI-enabled autonomous capabilities. He has served as principal investigator on research contracts for NASA, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering and a Ph.D. in aerospace and electrical engineering from The University of Alabama.
Email: jimneid@mit.edu