Nick Ioannidis

I’m Nick, a Ph.D. student in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) under the supervision of Dr. Xue Bin (Jason) Peng. I am interested in making robots and simulated characters move in smart, safe, and physically realistic ways.

Research

PriMoRetarget: Humanoid Motion Transfer Through Prioritized Motion Retargeting

Nicholas Ioannidis*, Dun Yang*, Max Smith, Tue Vu, Ziyu Zhang, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Xue Bin Peng

arXiv preprint, 2026

Project Page arXiv Video Cite

@article{ioannidis2026primoretarget,
  title = {PriMoRetarget: Humanoid Motion Transfer Through Prioritized Motion Retargeting},
  author = {Ioannidis, Nicholas and Yang, Dun and Smith, Max and Vu, Tue and Zhang, Ziyu and Omidshafiei, Shayegan and Peng, Xue Bin},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.12642},
  year = {2026}
}

Diffusion-based Planning with Learned Viability Filters

Nicholas Ioannidis, Daniele Reda*, Setareh Cohan*, Michiel van de Panne

Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2025

Paper Code Cite

@article{ioannidis2025diffusion,
  title = {Diffusion-based planning with learned viability filters},
  author = {Ioannidis, Nicholas and Reda, Daniele and Cohan, Setareh and van de Panne, Michiel},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},
  volume = {8},
  number = {4},
  pages = {1--23},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {ACM New York, NY}
}

Walk This Way: Imitation-free Reinforcement Learning of Flexibly-Constrained Walking Controllers

Tiffany Matthé, Nicholas Ioannidis, Michiel van de Panne

Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2025

Paper Cite

@article{matthe2025walk,
  title = {Walk This Way: Imitation-free Reinforcement Learning of Flexibly-Constrained Walking Controllers},
  author = {Matth{\'e}, Tiffany and Ioannidis, Nicholas and van de Panne, Michiel},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},
  volume = {8},
  number = {4},
  pages = {1--19},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {ACM New York, NY}
}

An Empirical Study of Non-Uniform Sampling in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control

Nicholas Ioannidis, Wilder Lavington, Mark Schmidt

Deep RL Workshop NeurIPS 2021

Paper Video Cite

@inproceedings{ioannidis2021an,
  title = {An Empirical Study of Non-Uniform Sampling in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control},
  author = {Ioannidis, Nicholas and Lavington, Jonathan Wilder and Schmidt, Mark},
  booktitle = {Deep RL Workshop NeurIPS 2021},
  year = {2021},
}

Projects

OpenSim2Real: An End-To-End Open Source Robotic Platform for Sim2Real Research

Engineering Capstone Project

Project Page Video