Rey Pocius

I am a Machine Learning Engineer at AlertWest, where I work on cutting-edge AI solutions for wildfire detection and monitoring systems.

Previously, I was a Machine Learning Engineer and SME at Metal Toad, where I gained extensive experience with AWS and cloud-based ML solutions.

I completed my Masters in Computer Science at the University of Southern California as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science at Oregon State University.

My research background includes work on reinforcement learning, explainable AI, and robotics through positions at USC, Oregon State University's Personal Robotics Lab, and the United States Naval Research Laboratory.

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / X

Let's Connect

I'm always excited to discuss machine learning, research ideas, and innovative applications of AI. Whether you're interested in collaborating on a project, exploring new research directions, or just want to chat about the latest developments in ML, feel free to reach out via email or schedule a call. I'd love to hear from you!

Research

My current research interests are in diffusion models, multimodal learning, graph neural networks, and reinforcement learning.


Diffusion Models	Graph Neural Networks	Reinforcement Learning

Personal Interests

Outside of work, I enjoy staying active through tennis, pickleball, and rock climbing

Videos

Oregon State University Experience

Publications

Communicating Robot Goals via Haptic Feedback in Manipulation Tasks
Rey Pocius, Naghmeh Zamani, Heather Culbertson, Stefanos Nikolaidis
HRI Pioneers Workshop, HRI '20 Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 591-593

Neural networks for incremental dimensionality reduced reinforcement learning
William Curran, Rey Pocius, Bill Smart
2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017), 1559-1565

Comparing Reward Shaping, Visual Hints, and Curriculum Learning
Rey Pocius, David Isele, Mark Roberts, David W. Aha
Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18), 8135-8136

Strategic Tasks for Explainable Reinforcement Learning
Rey Pocius, Lawrence Neal, Alan Fern
Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), 10007-10008

Building Early Elementary Teacher Confidence in Teaching Computer Science Through a Low-Cost, Scalable Research-Practitioner Collaboration
Justin Clough, Patricia Chaffey, Gautam Salhotra, Colin G. Cess, Rey Pocius, Dr. Katie Mills
2020 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition

Demonstrations

Robot-Assisted Hair Brushing

33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS 2019 Demo

Outreach

I previously contributed to the BOTS (Building Opportunities with Teachers in Schools) program at USC, helping create scalable robotics and coding curricula for K-12 education.

(website code from this guy)