Nikolay Nikolov

Doctoral Student
Email: [email protected]

About me:

I am Niko, a PhD student in Computer Vision and Robotics, working with Prof. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Danda Pani Paudel.
My work is at the intersection of Reinforcement Learning, Computer Vision and LLMs. I am particularly interested in learning multimodal behaviors and developing foundational models for Robotics and World Modeling.

I was part of the core research team of Wayve, an autonomous driving company. There, I developed one of the first offline Reinforcement Learning models applied to autonomous driving in the real world. With my team we proved that end-to-end AI can drive in complex urban environments such as central London, which at the time was considered doubtful by the entire industry.

I am co-author of two accepted papers at top robotics and ML venues: ICRA and ICLR. Amongst my achievements is a bronze medal at the International Young Physicists’ Tournament in 2013 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Education

– ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Sep 2017 – Sep 2018

M.Eng. Exchange

– Imperial College London, United Kingdom, Oct 2014 – Sep 2018

M.Eng. Electronic and Information Engineering (First Class Honors)

Professional Experience

Wayve, London, UK, Dec 2018 – Dec 2022

Applied Scientist