Teaching and Mentoring

I am currently serving as an advisor of three doctoral researchers and one master student. Before that, I have supervised four master theses, several bachelors theses, summer interns and student projects.

I have a long history of volunteering as a mentor in the last 10-15 years.

I am always open to teach, with my main interest being in hands-on robotics, mainly visual-language-action models. 

If you need a training in these or similar topics, or are looking for a partnership, please get in touch.

Special course in Computer Science D: Practical Learning-Based Methods for Robotic Manipulation

Aalto University, Finland

Offered: Spring 2026

Role: Responsible Teacher

This course introduces students to programming a robotic arm through hands-on exercises and small practical projects. The course provides a practical introduction to methods for learning-based robotic manipulation using the open-source SO-101 robotic arm and the LeRobot framework. Students become familiar with imitation learning as an example of a learning-based approach for robotic manipulation and implement provided examples. Based on these foundations, they will develop a small project on the robotic arm.

The course emphasises practical experimentation with learning-based manipulation methods and their deployment from simulation to physical hardware.

I built the course from scratch, prepared all learning materials, taught the lectures and lead practical exercises.

Course Description

Robotic Manipulation

Aalto University, Finland

Offered: Spring 2025

Role: Guest Lecturer and Teaching Assistant

I gave a guest lecture on Foundation Models for Robotic Manipulation. I participated in organizing and leading the labs as a TA.

Artificial Intelligence

Sofia University, Bulgaria

Offered: Spring 2018

Role: Teaching Assistant

As a TA, I prepared and lead programming labs and assessed student assignments.

Information Retrieval

Sofia University, Bulgaria

Offered: Spring 2018

Role: Teaching Assistant

As a TA, I prepared and lead programming labs and assessed student assignments.

Workshop on Physical AI

Aalto University

Presented: June 2026

Role: Lecturer

I co-organized a workshop on physical AI together with Aalto Robotics Club. I helped the students with their robot setups, and gave a lecture on VLAs as part of the workshop.

Tutorial on Discrete Latent Structures in Natural Language Processing

ACL

Presented: July 2019

Role: Lecturer

As a lecturer, I participated in the tutorial preparation, and presented one part of it. The tutorial attended by over 300 people and was part of at ACL 2019, the biggest NLP conference.

Tutorial slides can be found here

I have volunteered as a mentor in the following initiatives:

Mentor, Aalto University Mentoring Programme, Dec 2025 - May 2026

Mentor, Women in AI Finland, Jan 2024 - Nov 2024

Student Mentor, ABLE Mentor, Oct 2014 - Present

Programming Mentor, Rails Girls Sofia, 2013 - 2015

Lecturer in Programming, Vratsa Software Community, Mar 2015 - Aug 2015

I have taken the following pedagogical courses:

Course Design (5 ECTS), Aalto University (2026)

Doctoral Supervision (3 ECTS), Aalto University (2026)

Teaching for Executive Education (2 ECTS), Aalto University (2026)

APeda Intro (5 ECTS), Aalto University (2024)