I am the Founding Engineer and Head of Software at Eka Robotics. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Oxford, where I studied reinforcement learning and robotics. I also spent a couple of years as a research intern at DeepMind and Google Brain Robotics.

Prior to my Ph.D., I did research at Robotic AI and Learning Lab (RAIL) at the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with Sergey Levine and Tuomas Haarnoja. I also spent a few years as a software engineer in industry, building statistical analysis and machine learning products at Statwing and Qualtrics.

I like building software and contributing to open-source projects like MuJoCo and Ray.

Publications and Preprints

  • Tuomas Haarnoja, Ben Moran, Guy Lever, Sandy H. Huang, Dhruva Tirumala, Markus Wulfmeier, Jan Humplik, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, Noah Y. Siegel, Roland Hafner, Michael Bloesch, Kristian Hartikainen, Arunkumar Byravan, Leonard Hasenclever, Yuval Tassa, Fereshteh Sadeghi, Nathan Batchelor, Federico Casarini, Stefano Saliceti, Charles Game, Neil Sreendra, Kushal Patel, Marlon Gwira, Andrea Huber, Nicole Hurley, Francesco Nori, Raia Hadsell, Nicolas Heess. Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.13653. 2023.

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  • Sasha Salter*, Kristian Hartikainen*, Walter Goodwin, Ingmar Posner. Priors, Hierarchy, and Information Asymmetry for Skill Transfer in Reinforcement Learning. 11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). 2023.

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  • Matthew Fellows, Kristian Hartikainen, and Shimon Whiteson. Bayesian Bellman Operators. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). 2021.

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  • Luisa Zintgraf, Leo Feng, Cong Lu, Maximilian Igl, Kristian Hartikainen, Katja Hofmann, and Shimon Whiteson. Exploration in Approximate Hyper-State Space for Meta Reinforcement Learning. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 2021.

    paper | code
  • Kristian Hartikainen, Xinyang Geng, Tuomas Haarnoja*, and Sergey Levine*. Dynamical Distance Learning for Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Skill Discovery. 8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). 2020.

    paper | videos
  • Henry Zhu, Justin Yu, Abhishek Gupta, Dhruv Shah, Kristian Hartikainen, Avi Singh, Vikash Kumar, and Sergey Levine. The Ingredients of Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning. 8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). 2020.

    paper | videos
  • Michael Ahn, Henry Zhu, Kristian Hartikainen, Hugo Ponte, Abhishek Gupta, Sergey Levine, Vikash Kumar. ROBEL: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots. 3rd Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL). 2019.

    paper | videos | code
  • Avi Singh, Larry Yang, Kristian Hartikainen, Chelsea Finn, and Sergey Levine. End-to-End Robotic Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering. Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS). 2019.

    paper | videos | code
  • Tuomas Haarnoja*, Aurick Zhou*, Kristian Hartikainen*, George Tucker, Sehoon Ha, Jie Tan, Vikash Kumar, Henry Zhu, Abhishek Gupta, Pieter Abbeel, and Sergey Levine. Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.05905. 2018.

    paper | videos | code
  • Tuomas Haarnoja*, Kristian Hartikainen*, Pieter Abbeel, and Sergey Levine. Latent Space Policies for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 2018.

    paper | videos | code

Industry Experience

Founding Engineer / Head of Software

Eka Robotics

Software Engineer 2

Qualtrics, LLC.

Software Engineer

Statwing, Inc.

Data Scientist/Software Engineer

Wolt Enterprises Oy

Research Experience

Research Intern

Google Brain. With Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang.

Research Intern

DeepMind. With Philemon Brakel, Steven Bohez.

Research Intern

DeepMind. With Nicolas Heess, Tuomas Haarnoja.

Research Staff

Robotics and AI Lab, University of California, Berkeley. With Sergey Levine, Tuomas Haarnoja.

Research Assistant

Machine Learning for Big Data Group, Aalto University. With Alexander Jung.

Research Assistant

Embedded Systems Group, Aalto University. With Vesa Hirvisalo, Heikki Saikkonen.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of Oxford
United Kingdom

Reinforcement learning, robotics

M.Sc. in Computer Science (5.0/5.0)

Aalto University
Finland

Software technology, machine learning

Thesis: Performance Analysis of Packet Processing Systems (with distinction)

B.Sc. in Computer Science

Aalto University
Finland

Software technology, industrial management

Thesis: Methods for Adaptive User Interfaces (with distinction)