February 4, 2026
Isaac Remy, a second-year Ph.D. student, has been selected as an inaugural Amazon AI Ph.D. Fellowship recipient. The fellowship recognizes Remy's work on making autonomous systems safer and more socially aware in Assistant Professor Karen Leung's CTRL Lab.
Making autonomous systems play nice
Isaac Remy
Remy's research addresses a critical gap in autonomous systems: defining what it means for a robot to act responsibly in shared spaces. Technical safety and collision avoidance form the foundation, but the deeper challenge involves teaching robots to understand social agency and human context.
Responsibility in these environments isn't a fixed set of rules. It's shaped by explicit laws, implicit norms, and the specific situation at hand. Remy's work focuses on helping AI systems learn these unspoken human expectations, moving them beyond basic obstacle avoidance toward socially intelligent behavior. The goal is ensuring that as autonomous systems enter our world, they act as responsible participants in shared human environments.
To make this vision practical, his work introduces a mathematical framework centered on "responsibility," which he defines as an agent's willingness to adjust its preferred actions to enable safe interactions with others. Consider an autonomous car and a delivery robot approaching the same intersection. Through this framework, Remy's system uses machine learning and optimization techniques to determine which agent should yield based on learned patterns of safe interaction.
Isaac Remy’s research focuses on helping autonomous robots navigate shared spaces with human-like social awareness.
The research offers several practical advantages. By combining differentiable optimization with control theory, the framework provides a quantitative, understandable explanation for each safety decision. The system learns from both synthetic and real-world human interaction data to mirror how people naturally cooperate. And the approach scales to applications ranging from autonomous vehicle coordination to warehouse robot teams and disaster response scenarios.
Looking ahead
"This fellowship recognizes Isaac's commitment to building AI systems that people can trust and feel comfortable around," says Professor Leung. "It's exciting to see his work on responsible autonomy get this level of support." Leung also notes that beyond his research contributions, Remy mentors peers and organizes research activities within the CTRL Lab.
With the Amazon AI Ph.D. Fellowship, Remy plans to use large-scale computing resources to extend his algorithms to broader applications, helping ensure future AI systems align with human values and social expectations.