Contact Information

Email:    fmgarcia [at] cs [dot] umass [dot] edu
LinkedIn: Click for profile
Resume: Click for cv

Profile Picture

Francisco M. Garcia

I am a research scientist at Amazon Alexa in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My research interests are in machine learning, reinforcement learning, planning, and optimization. In 2019, I finished my Ph.D. in computer science in the College of Information and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, advised by Philip Thomas. I completed my M.S. in 2015 at UMass Amherst, and my B.S. at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

Professional Experience

Profile Picture
Profile Picture
Profile Picture
Profile Picture
Profile Picture
Profile Picture

Publications

  • Francisco Garcia, Luoxin Chen, Varun Kumar, He Xie and Jianhua Lu. Industry Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Natural Language Understanding. 2021 North American Chapter of the Association for Computation Linguistics, NAACL. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15871 pdf

  • Francisco M. Garcia, Chris Nota, Philip S. Thomas. Learning Reusable Options for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning. 2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.01577 pdf

  • Francisco M. Garcia, Philip S. Thomas. A Meta-MDP Approach to Exploration for Lifelong Reinforrcement Learning. 2019, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS. pdf, video

  • Francisco M. Garcia, Bruno C. da Silva, Philip Thomas. A Compression-Inspired Framework for Macro Discovery. 2019, Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in Games, AAAI. pdf

  • Giguere Stephen, Francisco M. Garcia, Shridar Mahadevan. A Manifold Approach to Learning Mutually Orthogonal Subspaces. 2016, https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02992. pdf

  • Kai Ninomiya, Mubbasir Kapadia, Alexander Shoulson, Francisco M. Garcia and Norman I. Badler, Planning Approaches to Constraint-aware Navigation in Dynamic Environments, 2014 Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds pdf

  • Francisco M. García, Mubbasir Kapadia and Norman I. Badler, GPU-based Dynamic Search on Adaptive Resolution Grids, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Hong Kong, China pdf, video

  • Mubbasir Kapadia, Kai Ninomiya, Alexander Shoulson, Francisco M. García and Norman I. Badler, Constraint Aware Navigation in Dynamic Environments, ACM SIGGRAPH conference on Motion in Games (MIG '13) pdf, video

  • Mubbasir Kapadia, Francisco M. García, and Norman I. Badler. Dynamic Search on the GPU. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2013 pdf, video

  • Mubbasir Kapadia, Alejandro Porres, Francisco M. García, Vivek Reddy, Nuria Pelechano, and Norman I. Badler. Multi-Domain Real-time Planning in Dynamic Environments. ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium of Computer Animation, 2013 pdf, video

  • Shoulson, Alexander, Francisco M. García, Matthew Jones, Robert Mead & Norman I. Badler (2011). “Parameterizing Behavior-Trees”. Jan M. Allbeck & Petros Faloutsos (Eds.). Fourth International Conference on Motion in Games (MIG) pdf