Topic: Robotics

Oliver Cameron

Oliver is a leader in self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.

Most recently, Oliver was the Vice President of Product at Cruise, joining through the acquisition of Voyage. Cruise is building the world's most advanced self-driving vehicles to safely connect people with the places, things, and experiences they care about. Through partnerships with General Motors and Honda, Cruise is the only self-driving company with fully integrated manufacturing at scale, building all-electric, zero-emission, self-driving vehicles that will help save lives, reimagine cities, reduce carbon pollution, redefine time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for individuals who live in dense urban settings.

Prior to Cruise, Oliver was the co-founder and CEO of Voyage. Voyage developed and deployed self-driving cars designed for senior citizens who struggled to drive. Voyage's first product was an autonomous taxi service located within a 160,000 resident retirement community in Florida. Here, their fleet delivered on the promise of autonomous driving—solving the mobility needs of residents who need it most. Voyage raised $52M in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Initialized Capital, and CRV. Cruise acquired Voyage in March 2021.

Prior to Voyage, Oliver was the Vice President of Product & Engineering at the online education startup Udacity. Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born. At Udacity, Oliver led a 200-strong Product, Engineering, and Content team, focusing on our autonomous vehicle, robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep learning curriculum.

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.

Dennis Hong

Dr. Dennis Hong, a TED alumnus, is a Professor and the Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA.
His research focuses on robot locomotion and manipulation, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. He is the inventor of a number of novel robots and mechanisms, including the ‘whole skin locomotion’ for mobile robots inspired by how amoeba move, a unique three-legged waking robot STriDER, an air-powered robotic hand RAPHaEL, and the world’s first car that can be driven by the blind.
His work has been featured on numerous national and international media. Washington Post magazine called Dr. Hong “the Leonardo da Vinci of robots.” Dr. Hong has been named to Popular Science’s 8th annual “Brilliant 10”, honoring top scientists younger than 40 years of age from across the United States, “Forward Under 40” by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni Association, and also honored as “Top 40 Under 40” alumni by Purdue University. Hong’s other past awards include the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, the SAE International’s Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award, and the ASME Freudenstein / GM Young Investigator Award to name a few.
Dr. Hong also actively leads student teams for various international robotics and design competitions winning numerous top prizes including the DARPA Urban Challenge where they won third place and the $500,000 prize, and the RoboCup, the international autonomous robot soccer competition where his team won First Place in both the Kid-Size and Adult-Size Humanoid divisions and brought the Louis Vuitton Cup Best Humanoid Award to the United States for the very first time. Dr. Hong received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994), his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University (1999, 2002).
He is also a serious gourmet chef and a magician performing annual charity magic shows and lectures on the science of magic.

Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun is CEO of Udacity, an online private educational organization. He was a Google Fellow and VP, and a Research Professor at Stanford University. He has published over 370 scientific papers and 11 books, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the US.

Fast Company named Thrun the fifth most creative person in business, and Foreign Policy touted him Global Thinker #4. Thrun works on revolutionizing all of transportation, education, and mobile devices. At Google, founded Google X, which is home to projects like the Google self-driving car and the recently announced Google Glass. He and his team are trying to radically innovate, innovate, innovate.

Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car. Thrun is also known for his work on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics, with applications including robotic mapping. In recognition of his contributions, and at age 39, Thrun was elected into the National Academy of Engineering and also into the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2007.

Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which has since been placed on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His team also developed a vehicle called Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007.

He says: "I am on a mission to learn from Google's amazing founders, Sergey and Larry". "At Udacity, we are trying to democratize higher education. Udacity stands for "we are audacious, for you, the student". This is an audacious step, and it has been a thrill ride." He is an educator, programmer, robotics developer and computer scientist from Germany.

In 2011, Thrun received the Max-Planck-Research Award and the inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize. Fast Company selected Thrun as the fifth most creative person in business in the world.