Jaime Fernández Fisac

Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Princeton University

Email: jfisac at princeton

Office: EQuad F315

About Me

I am interested in developing theoretical and computational tools to enable safe robot operation in the physical world and the human space.

As robots move from factory floors to our homes, cities and roads, their behavior cannot be hard-coded ahead of time, but must be intelligently adapted as they navigate the world and encounter new situations. In these uncertain settings, safety and learning are inextricably intertwined: one is not possible without the other.

My work combines safety analysis from control theory with machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to enable robotic systems to reason competently about their own safety in spite of using inevitably fallible models of the world and other agents.

Specifically, my research focuses on the following areas: 

• Safe learning for robotic systems

• Safe and scalable multi-agent decision-making

• Safe human-centered autonomy

Bio in a nutshell

I completed my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley in 2019; at the midpoint of my PhD, I spent 6 months doing R&D work at Apple. Before that, I got my B.S./M.S. Electrical Engineering degree at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain and a Masters in Aeronautics at Cranfield University in the UK.

Before joining Princeton in Summer 2020, I spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as Google’s Self-Driving Car project).

At Princeton, I am an Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I am also an Associated Faculty in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning and a co-director of the Princeton AI4ALL summer camp.