Pieter Abbeel is Professor in Artificial Intelligence & Robotics and Director of the Robot Learning Lab at UC Berkeley since 2008, he’s also Co-Founder of Covariant.AI since 2017 and Co-Founder of Gradescope.com since 2014, Advisor to OpenAI, Founding Faculty Partner at the Venture Fund AI@TheHouse, Advisor to a half dozen AI/Robotics start-ups, and frequently gives exec-level lectures on latest trends in AI.

His work focuses on making robots learn from people (apprenticeship learning), how to make robots learn through their own trial and error (reinforcement learning), and how to speed up skill acquisition through learning-to-learn (meta-learning). His robots have learned advanced helicopter aerobatics, knot-tying, basic assembly, organizing laundry, locomotion, and vision-based robotic manipulation.

He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICLR, 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.