Jelin Raphael Akkara

I am pursuing a PhD in Brain, Mind, and Computer Science at the University of Padua, in collaboration with Fondazione Bruno Kessler. My research in Embodied AI explores how autonomous agents ground human goals in complex environments and adapt when actions fail. My interests include fine-grained object navigation, personalized spatial reasoning, and memory-guided adaptation, with a growing focus on failure understanding and recovery.

My current work investigates how agents can use multimodal reasoning and memory to diagnose failures, reason about alternative actions, and retrieve past experiences to guide recovery. I am also interested in how causal reasoning and world models can help agents anticipate failures and evaluate the consequences of their actions.