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 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.

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News

[Mar 2026] Giving a talk at the Computing Research Association Grad Cohort Workshop.
[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 on arXiv.
[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

Under construction!

Industry Experience

Under construction!

Open Source Projects

Under construction!

Teaching & Service

Under construction!

Honors & Awards

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Hobbies

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Last updated February 2026. Template from here.