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 on making robots and simulated characters move in smart, safe, and physically realistic ways.

News

Jan 2026	Started my Ph.D in Computing Science supervised Dr. Jason Peng
May 2025 – Dec 2025	Spent eight wonderful months interning at the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI)
Jun 2025	Our two papers got accepted in SCA 2025
May 2025	Completed my M.Sc in Computer Science supervised by Dr. Michiel van de Panne
May 2023	Graduated with B.A.Sc in Engineering Physics from UBC
Oct 2021	Our work got accepted in NeurIPS 2021 Deep RL Workshop

Research

Diffusion-based Planning with Learned Viability Filters

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

Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2025

Paper / 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