
Eric Eaton
Senior Lecturer, CIS
“Eric Eaton is a faculty member in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the GRASP (General Robotics Automation, Sensing, Perception) lab. Prior to joining Penn, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the computer science department at Bryn Mawr College. His primary research interests lie in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data mining with applications to robotics, search & rescue, environmental sustainability, and medicine. In particular, his research focuses on developing versatile AI systems that can learn multiple tasks over a lifetime of experience in complex environments, transfer learned knowledge to rapidly acquire new abilities, and collaborate effectively with humans and other agents through interaction. This research is funded by grants from the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and Lockheed Martin.
Before moving into academia, Eric spent two years as a senior research scientist at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories working in applied research. At Lockheed Martin ATL, he led a number of machine learning research projects in the Artificial Intelligence Lab with a focus on their application for a variety of DoD organizations. While at Lockheed Martin, he was also part-time faculty in computer science at Swarthmore College.
Eric received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning. His dissertation developed methods for selective knowledge transfer between learning tasks and was advised by Marie desJardins. At UMBC, he was a member of the Multi-Agent Planning and LEarning (MAPLE) research group and also a part-time instructor.”
Research Areas
- Service Robots
- Perception
- Vision
- Data-Driven Control Algorithms
- Autonomy
- Machine Learning
Research Groups
Publications
Publisher arXiv
Publisher AI Matters
AI Profiles: An Interview with Maja Mataric
Publisher AI Matters
Autonomous Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer in Lifelong Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning
Publisher International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Publisher AI Matters
Deep lifelong reinforcement learning for resilient control and coordination
Publisher University of Pennsylvania
Design of a Low-Cost Platform for Autonomous Mobile Service Robots
Publisher International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Lifelong Learning for Disturbance Rejection on Mobile Robots
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Publisher Scientfic Reports
Online Contrastive Divergence with Generative Replay: Experience Replay without Storing Data
Publisher arXiv
Reports on 2015 AAAI Workshop Program
Publisher AI Magazine
Safe Policy Search for Lifelong reinforcement learning with sublinear regret
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Transfer Learning via Minimizing the Performance Gap Between Domains
Publisher Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Tree-structured boosting- Connections between gradient stumps and full decision trees
Publisher arXiv
Using task descriptions in lifelong machine Learning for Improved Performance and Zero-Shot Transfer
Publisher Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
Using Task Features for Zero-Shot Knowledge Transfer in Lifelong Learning
Publisher International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Publisher AI Matters
Work in Progress: Lifelong Learning for Disturbance Rejection on Mobile Robots
Publisher International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)
News
Students
Research Staff
Alumni

Research Areas
- Service Robots
- Perception
- Vision
- Data-Driven Control Algorithms
- Autonomy
- Machine Learning