Michael Piseno

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About Me

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University advised by Karen Liu. Previously, I graduated summa cum laude from Georgia Tech with a BS in Computer Science and minors in Mathematics and Chinese Language. I have spent time in both research and engineering roles at DeepMind, IBM Research, Dropbox, Meta, and Amazon.

My research focuses on robotics and AI. I work on whole-body human motion tracking and dexterous manipulation. I am also interested in human and object pose estimation from video. My research is supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. I also founded and lead the AI Policy Forum at Stanford.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  1. Tara Sadjadpour*, Michael Piseno*, Diana Poplacenel, Justin Yu, Abigail O'Niell, Rika Antovona, Jeannette Bohg. “Topological and Geometric Representations of Deformable Point Clouds”. 2025. (Under review)
  2. Qingzhou Lu, Yao Feng, Baiyu Shi, Michael Piseno, Zhenan Bao, and C. Karen Liu. “GentleHumanoid: Learning Upper-body Compliance for Contact-rich Human and Object Interaction”. 2025. (Under review) [ site ]
  3. Takara E. Truong, Michael Piseno, Zhaoming Xie, and C. Karen Liu. “PDP: Physics-Based Character Animation via Diffusion Policy”. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia, 2024. DOI. [ site ]

Miscellaneous

Notes on Backpropagation in Convolutional Layers