Biography

"If it's not hurting anyone, great. Get yours, and maybe share some with your neighbors."
- Kristen Anne Bell (2019, Commencement Speech at USC).

Guillaume Sartoretti joined the Mechanical Engineering department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as an Assistant Professor in 2019. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), where he worked with Prof. Howie Choset. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from EPFL (Switzerland) in 2016 for his dissertation on "Control of Agent Swarms in Random Environments," under the supervision of Prof. Max-Olivier Hongler. He also holds a B.S. and an M.S. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Geneva (Switzerland).

Guillaume is interested in the emergence of collaboration/cooperation in large groups of intelligent agents making individual choices, based on their local understanding of the world. In particular, his team is interested in identifying the right information and ways of processing it that allows agents to reason about and improve decentralized cooperative decision-making. His work is inscribed in the current push away from centralized methods, where a single entity/AI controls each agent in the team, and toward distributed/decentralized approaches where agents are in charge of their own destiny. To do so, his work draws from recent advances in artificial intelligence, in particular distributed deep reinforcement learning (RL), as well as from more conventional methods such as stochastic modeling and feedback control. Applications range from multi-robot systems, where independent robots need to coordinate their actions to achieve a common goal, to high-DoF articulated robots, where joints need to be carefully coupled during locomotion in rough terrain.

Guillaume was a Manufacturing Futures Initiative (MFI) postdoctoral fellow at CMU in 2018-2019, was awarded an Amazon Research Awards in 2022, as well as an Outstanding Early Career Award from NUS' College of Design and Engineering in 2023.

In his spare time, Guillaume is an enthusiastic (but casual) gamer (Baldur's Gate 3, Old School RuneScape, Beat Saber, ...) and Magic: The Gathering player (as well as a variety of other board games, and in particular collaborative, campaign-based ones). His Erdös Number is three (Thank you Sven!).

Webpage at NUS-ME - Google Scholar - ResearchGate - Academic CV

Contact

Guillaume SARTORETTI
Assistant Professor
National University of Singapore
Department of Mechanical Engineering
9 Engineering Drive 1
Block E2, #02-01
Singapore 117576
Office: +65 6516 4882 (DID)

guillaume.sartoretti@nus.edu.sg

(I strongly prefer email over phone messages.)