Shivam Vats
Postdoctoral Researcher at Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolShivam Vats is a postdoctoral researcher in robot learning at Brown University with 12 years of experience spanning robotics research, software engineering, and open-source mathematics libraries. He completed a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, where his work on skill learning and planning targeted contact-rich manipulation for collaborative manufacturing and household robots. Shivam pairs rigorous academic research with practical systems work—mentoring teams on autonomy stacks, improving long-horizon recovery via hierarchical RL during an MERL internship, and shipping perception and planning code for ground vehicles. An active open-source core developer, he significantly accelerated symbolic series expansion in SymPy (and ported it to SymEngine), delivering orders-of-magnitude speedups and robust numeric handling across C++ and Python. Based in Providence, he focuses on robots that plan both task sequences and new motor skills when faced with unseen hardware or objects. Beyond papers and code, he brings a rare combination of mathematical depth and systems-level pragmatism that makes research directly usable on real robots.
12 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
High School Science with Maths, High School Science with Maths at Delhi Public School - R. K. PuramDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Robotics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Robotics at Carnegie Mellon UniversityBachelor's and Master’s Degrees Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor's and Master’s Degrees Mathematics and Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (12)
mathematics10
math-functions10
unit-testing10
computer-algebra10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
math10
python10
computer-algebra-system10
maths10
testing10
test-automation9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
sympy/sympy
Nov 2014 - Feb 2017
A computer algebra system written in pure Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:123 commits, 19 PRs, 1 push in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Shivam primarily contributed to the SymPy library by correcting and enhancing methods related to the mathematical functions within the `sympy/sympy` repository. Their work focused on improving the `as_leading_term` methods for hyperbolic functions, correcting simplification issues in summation functions, and adding definitions for new hyperbolic functions such as `sech` and `csch`. They also added test cases for the implemented functions and rewrote existing ones. The user also implemented a reciprocal class and added more tests related to hyperbolic functions, including series expansion for these functions.
mathpythonsciencecomputer-algebra-systemalgebra
symengine/symengine
Dec 2014 - Jul 2015
SymEngine is a fast symbolic manipulation library, written in C++
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 10 PRs, 121 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:Shivam primarily contributed to improving the SymEngine library, a fast symbolic manipulation library written in C++. Their work focused on fixing bugs related to the printing of mathematical expressions, specifically those involving the `pow` function and complex numbers. Additionally, they added a `symbols` method to a Python utilities file and implemented the `add_poly` function. These changes involved modifying C++ code and Python scripts, demonstrating a focus on extending and refining the library's core functionality.
manipulationmathmanipulation-librarycpptheorem-proving
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.