Who are we?

Stefanie Tellex

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

David Watkins is a Principal Research Lead at the RAI Institute, where he invents systems that enable robots to learn from multimodal sensory data. He pioneered handheld force-based data collection for robot training, built video prediction systems for robot policies using internet-scale video (early 2023), and developed gradient-free RL for online learning with semantic reasoning (U.S. Patent pending). He founded two research teams to scale these innovations: Foundation Models (10+ researchers) and Capture (30 people).

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 (IROS 2022 Best Paper Finalist). His research has been published at CoRL, IJCAI, ICML, IROS, and ICRA, and he is co-authoring “Elephants Don’t Write Sonnets” (MIT Press 2026) with Stefanie Tellex. He co-organized the New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS) in 2025 and won 1st place at the MineRL BASALT Competition (NeurIPS 2021).

Previously, he 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.