Rajat Talak (PhD, MIT) is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the National University of Singapore. He was a Research Scientist (2022-25) and a Postdoctoral Associate (2020-2022) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his PhD from the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems at MIT in 2020. He holds a Master of Science degree (with Gold Medal) from the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and a B.Tech from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology - Surathkal, India.
His research interests are in Robot Perception, Optimization and Learning, and Autonomous Systems. He is the Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026, and Area Chair for the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Conference 2026. He has served as the Technical Program Committee Member for the Age of Information and Age and Semantics of Information Workshops at Infocom 2022-2025. He has led and organized many workshops at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), and International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) on the topics of Safe Autonomy, Space Robotics, and Long-term Autonomy. He is also the recipient of ACM MobiHoc 2018 best paper award and has co-authored a manuscript on information freshness in his previous avatar.