Who are we?

Stefanie Tellex is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Her group, the Humans To Robots Lab, creates robots that seamlessly collaborate with people to meet their needs using language, gesture, and probabilistic inference, aiming to empower every person with a collaborative robot. She completed her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in 2010 and published numerous award-winning papers at top robotics venues. Her work has been featured in the press on National Public Radio, BBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired and Wired UK, as well as the New Yorker. She is currently on leave from Brown, serving as a Technical Advisor to the Robotics and AI Institute in Cambridge, MA. All opinions on this blog are her own, and not those of either RAI or Brown University.

David Watkins is a Research Lead at the RAI Institute, where he leads the 30-person Capture team focused on data collection device design and hand design for robotic manipulation, and founded the Foundation Models team, developing models that generalize across robotic tasks. He completed his Ph.D. at the Columbia University Robotics Lab in 2022 under Peter Allen, with a dissertation on mobile manipulation without runtime localization. His research has been published at ICRA, IROS, CoRL, ICML, and IJCAI, and was nominated for a best paper award at IROS 2020. He co-organized the New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS) in 2025, and his work has been featured on Yannic Kilcher’s YouTube channel. He previously worked at RightHand Robotics and the Army Research Lab, and co-founded Odefi, a DeFi startup. All opinions on this blog are his own, and not those of the RAI Institute.