Topic: ChatGPT

Pieter Abbeel

AI speaker Pieter Abbeel is an AI & Robotics Professor, as well as the Robot Learning Lab’s Director at UC Berkeley. In 2014, Pieter co-founded Gradescope.com, while in 2017, he co-founded Covariant.ai. He is also an Advisor for many companies in the Robotics and AI field, including OpenAI. Moreover, Pieter created the Venture Fund AI@TheHouse and often gives lectures on artificial intelligence.

Pieter started the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab following his appointment at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. Furthermore, in 2014, he helped develop Gradescope, which was sold to TurnItIn in 2018. Pieter created Gradescope with Sergey Karayev, Arjun Singh, Ibrahim Awwal, and several other UC Berkeley engineers.

Speaker Pieter Abbeel began working for OpenAI in 2016. Since then, he has written plenty of articles on robot learning, reinforcement learning, and unsupervised learning. 2016 saw him also take on the role of co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. The BAIR involves undergraduate and postdoctoral students that are passionate about robotics and machine learning.

His other venture is Berkeley Open Arms, which has licensed the intellectual property (IP) from Berkeley related to the Blue Robot project. In 2017, he was appointed as a tenured, full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, Peter Chen, and Tianhao Zhang launched AI-based company covariant.ai in 2017. The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum all wrote articles regarding the company’s launch.

Covariant.ai leverages recent developments in deep reinforcement learning and deep imitation learning to produce artificial intelligence software that simplifies the process of teaching robots new, advanced skills. Abbeel is actively performing researches as well as teaching upper-division and graduate courses in robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep unsupervised learning.

He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICML, NIPS and ICRA, early career awards from NSF, Darpa, ONR, AFOSR, Sloan, TR35, IEEE, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Pieter's work is frequently featured in the popular press, including New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Tech Review, NPR.

Current main research thrusts: robotics and machine learning with particular focus on deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, meta-learning, learning-to-learn, and AI safety.

On OpenAI: OpenAI was co-founded by Pieter Abbeel's PhD student John Schulman (who is also the lead architecture behind ChatGPT) in December 2015. Abbeel himself was recruited to OpenAI in early 2016, where he helped lead many of the OpenAI research projects, including projects on reinforcement learning, generative AI, meta-learning, robot learning. In Fall 2017 Abbeel left his full-time role at OpenAI to found Covariant, which is leading the way in AI powered robotic automation, and transitioned into an Advisory position at OpenAI.

Toby Walsh

Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, UNSW's new AI Institute. He is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, and he is also an adjunct fellow at CSIRO Data61. He was named by the Australian newspaper as a "rock star" of Australia's digital revolution. He has been elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has won the prestigious Humboldt Prize as well as the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellence in Engineering and ICT, and the ACP Research Excellence award. He has previously held research positions in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and Sweden. He has played a leading role at the UN and elsewhere on the campaign to ban lethal autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots"). His advocacy in this area has led to him being "banned indefinitely" from Russia.

Toby Walsh regularly appears in the media talking about the impact of AI and robotics on society. He is passionate that limits are placed on AI to ensure the public good such as with autonomous weapons. He has appeared on TV and radio stations on the ABC, BBC, Channel 7, Channel 9, Channel 10, CCTV, CNN, DW, NPR, RT, SBS, and VOA, as well as on numerous other radio stations and podcasts. He also writes frequently for print and online media. His work has appeared in the New Scientist, American Scientist, Le Scienze, Cosmos, Technology Review, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Conversation and "The Best Writing in Mathematics". He has given talks at public and trade events like CeBIT, the World Knowledge Forum, TEDx, New Scientist Live and writers festivals in Adelaide, Bendigo, Bhutan, Brisbane, Canberra, Geelong, Jaipur, Margaret River, Melbourne, Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Sydney and elsewhere. He has been profiled by the New York Times and the Brilliant, but was even more surprised (spelt embarrassed) to have an IMBD entry and to have been made the cover story of his old school magazine.