Rhythm Syed
rhythm dot syed at columbia dot edu

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia University, happily advised by Yunzhu Li and Tony Dear. I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University and M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

I want to build generalist robots that can reason about and interact with the physical world. My research interests include vision-language-action policies, world models, and agentic systems for robotic manipulation.

When not in the lab, I'm training for marathons 🏃

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News

[Apr 2026] Presenting our latest work at Amazon Research Day in Palo Alto!
[Mar 2026] Giving a talk at the Computing Research Association Grad Cohort Workshop in Seattle.
[Jan 2026] Started my internship at Toyota Research Institute on the Large Behavior Models team.
[Nov 2025] Serving as a reviewer for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
[Jan 2025] Started my PhD at Columbia University!
[Sep 2023] Started teaching NLP for Columbia's AI Executive Education program.
[Oct 2023] Excited to be an instructor for Correlation One's Data Science For All Fellowship!
[Aug 2021] Joined the Verizon AI Center as a Senior AI Scientist.
[Aug 2021] Graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
[May 2021] Presented our work on ontology learning and knowledge graph construction at the GTRI Research Conference.
[Jan 2021] Released our paper on latency prediction for Neural Architecture Search.
[Aug 2020] Started research at Georgia Tech Research Institute with Santiago Balestrini and Chao Zhang.
[Jul 2019] Joined AT&T Labs as a Data Scientist.
[May 2019] Graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University.
[Nov 2018] Presented our Indoor Positioning System at the Purdue Undergraduate Research Exposition.

Research

More to come!

Teaching & Service

I enjoy teaching and mentoring - please feel free to reach out!

COMS 4705 NLP Adjunct Lecturer: Columbia AI Executive Education
Instructor: Correlation One's Data Science For All Fellowship
Teaching Assistant: NLP @ Georgia Tech, Electronic Devices and Design @ Purdue
Cybersecurity Mentor: GenCyber Summer Camp @ The University of Memphis
Journal Reviewer: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

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Last updated February 2026. Template from here.