Jorge Mendez-Mendez
Jorge
Mendez-Mendez
Assistant Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Light Engineering
145 Stony Brook, NY 11794

Phone

(631) 632-8421

Interests

Lifelong machine learning, sequential decision making, robot learning, reinforcement learning.

Biography

Jorge Mendez-Mendez is an assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Stony Brook University. Before joining Stony Brook, he was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT CSAIL. He obtained his PhD (2022) and MSE (2018) from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and his Bachelor's degree (2016) in electronics engineering from Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela.

Awards

2022-2024 MIT-IBM Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship
2021 3rd place award of the Two Sigma Diversity PhD Fellowship
2020 Best paper award at the 4th Lifelong Learning Workshop at ICML

Research

Jorge is interested in the creation of versatile, intelligent, embodied agents that learn to better interact with the world by accumulating knowledge over their lifetimes. He focuses on the question of how these agents can leverage various forms of compositional and modular structures to transform the complex problem of modeling a lifelong data stream into simpler problems that can be more easily solved and whose solutions can be adapted, recombined, and reused in the future. Jorge's work mainly applies these methods to robotics, and also engages with related fields like computer vision and natural language.

Teaching Summary

ESE 577: Deep Learning Algorithms and Software