Owen Burns

Hi all! My name is Owen Burns, and I am a computer science student at UCF specializing in AI and robotics. My journey in AI started in high school during the COVID pandemic, when I became interested in reinforcement learning and subsequently completed my AP Research paper on emergent communication in MARL systems. As I believe that it will be the key to production-level robotics in the future, multi-agent systems have remained my north star, and I have continued work in that field via research on platooning at our autonomous vehicles lab. I’m honored and excited to dive deeper into this field with Katia Sycara this summer! Outside of multi-agent systems, my other main focus is natural language processing; my first project when I got to UCF was to build a self-supervised reinforcement learning system for knowledge graph query answering, which I co-authored a paper on with Google. I have continued work in that field both in-industry building LLM-powered assistants and at my startup creating a natural language universal API.