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 that of either RAI or Brown University.

David Watkins is a Ph.D. from Peter Allen’s Columbia University Robotics Lab. He has developed robotic systems across several domains, including assistive care, real-world, simulation, and video games. He has worked on projects sponsored or affiliated with the Army Research Lab, Google Robotics, NSF, and NVIDIA. His work has been nominated for a best paper award in mobile manipulation at IROS 2020. His work has been featured on Yannic Kilcher’s YouTube channel.