Sept 28, 1:30 - 1:45pm - Google Deepmind
Title: General purpose robotics with Gemini in the physical world.
Speaker: Kanishka Rao
Bio: Kanishka Rao is a Research Director in the DeepMind Robotics team, where he is focused on creating general-purpose robots operating in the physical world. He has worked on machine learning to solve complex research problems at Google for the past 12 years, including end-to-end neural networks for speech recognition, real world reinforcement learning and imitation learning for general purpose robotics and more recently leveraging foundation models for robot control. He received his PhD in particle physics from UC Irvine in 2013 working at the LHC, CERN.
Sept 28, 1:45 - 2pm - BitRobot Foundation
Title: BitRobot Network - Crowdsourcing the World's Open Robotics Lab
Speaker: Michael Cho
Bio: Michael Cho is the cofounder of BitRobot Network and FrodoBots Lab. He's also a co-host of the RoboPapers podcast which features interviews with authors from various Embodied AI papers.
Sept 29, 1:30 - 1:45pm - Galaxea
Speaker: Hang Zhao
Bio: Hang Zhao is the Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Galaxea (星海图), and an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, where he leads the MARS Lab. His research spans multi-modal learning, robot learning, and autonomous driving. At Galaxea, Zhao recently led the G0 VLA project and open-sourced the Galaxea Open-World Dataset, the world’s first large-scale real-world open-scene robot dataset. Previously, Zhao was a Research Scientist at Waymo, Google’s self-driving project. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Antonio Torralba, following a B.S. degree from Zhejiang University. Zhao has published over 100 papers with more than 30,000 citations. He was recognized in the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35), named to Forbes China’s 30 Under 30 Science List in 2020, ranked among the Top 3 for the Best Paper Award at CoRL 2023, and has served key roles at major conferences including CVPR, ICLR and NeurIPS.
Sept 29, 1:45 - 2pm - NVIDIA
Title: Accelerating the Path to Generalist Humanoid Robots
Speaker: Yuke Zhu
Bio: Yuke Zhu is a Director and Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research, where he co-leads the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) lab. He is also an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of UT-Austin, where he directs the Robot Perception and Learning (RPL) Lab. He focuses on developing intelligent algorithms for generalist robots and embodied agents to reason about and interact with the real world. He obtained his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He received the NSF CAREER Award, the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, and various faculty fellowships and research awards from Amazon, JP Morgan, and Sony Research.