Sessions: Robotics + AI 2019
April 18, 2019 — Berkeley
Speakers
Ali Farhadi
CEO Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)
Anthony Levandowski
Contributor
Claire Delaunay
COO Farm-ng
Colin Angle
Chairman, CEO and Founder iRobot
Eric Migicovsky
Partner Y Combinator
Gui Cavalcanti
Founder & CEO Breeze Automation
Ken Goldberg
Chief Scientist, Ambidextrous Robotics & Distinguished Chair, Engineering UC Berkeley College of Engineering
Marc Raibert
Executive Director The AI Institute
Melonee Wise
CTO Agility Robotics
Nima Keivan
Noah Ready-Campbell
Founder, CEO & Engineer Built Robotics
Raquel Urtasun
Founder & CEO Waabi
Sterling Anderson
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer Aurora
Ali Farhadi is the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Ali has been a professor at the UW Allen School since 2012. He first joined AI2 in 2015 to lead the institute’s computer vision research team with a focus on visual common-sense reasoning and the role of actions and interactions in visual understanding. While at AI2, he co-founded Xnor.ai, the first on-device deep learning startup that was acquired by Apple in 2020. Ali led Apple’s next-generation machine learning efforts until 2023 when he rejoined AI2 as CEO in July. Ali’s research impact has been globally recognized with several best paper awards at CVPR, NeruIPS, AAAI, NSF Career Award, and the Sloan Fellowship, and he was named one of Forbes’s Top 5 AI Entrepreneurs in 2018.e
Anthony Levandowski is a founding father of AI-powered autonomy. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Pronto, an autonomous-driving and safety technology company that is helping industrial sites like mines and quarries run autonomously across North America.
Claire is a seasoned robotics and engineering professional with a diverse background in the field. She most recently held the position of COO at Farm-ng. Prior to this, she served as Vice President of Engineering at Nvidia, where she developed the groundbreaking Isaac Platform for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Claire also co-founded self-driving tech company OTTO and held the role of Vice President of Engineering before its acquisition by Uber. Her experience extends to leading advanced robotics projects at Google Robotics.
Colin Angle is incurably optimistic about the future of people and robotics. A robot builder from MIT who wanted to change the world by making practical robotics a mainstream reality, Colin envisions a world where intelligent and and purpose-first robots help people do more. As a visionary at the forefront of the growing home robot industry, today Colin serves as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the iconic consumer robot company he founded in 1990: iRobot. He is an industry pioneer and one of the world’s leading authorities on practical robots. Under Colin’s leadership, iRobot has grown from a MIT startup to become the global leader in consumer robots, with $884 million in revenue and more than 1,000 employees in twelve countries. In 2002, iRobot established the home robot category with the creation of the award-winning Roomba robot vacuum. The company’s product line, including the Roomba and the Braava family of robot mops, made practical home robots a reality for the first time and have become the most successful consumer robots in history, with more than 25 million sold worldwide.
Eric Migicovsky was the founder and CEO of Pebble Technology and is a visiting partner at Y Combinator. He is a contributor to Hardware Studio, a new resource for hardware creators from Kickstarter, Avnet, and Dragon Innovation that launches today.
Gui Cavalcanti has been leading teams designing high performance hydraulic and pneumatic robots for the past 12 years. He worked on several humanoid and quadrupedal legged robots at Boston Dynamics, and later cofounded and ran MegaBots, building 15-ton, 16 foot tall, 430 horsepower hydraulic humanoid combat robots. His latest effort, Breeze Automation, is focused using high end control systems, hydraulic and pneumatic actuation, and novel mechanical design to create incredibly lightweight, very inexpensive robots that can operate in environments as extreme as under the ocean and in outer space. His goal is to bring affordable robotic automation to real world environments to automate the dull, dirty, dangerous tasks that have been promised for decades but remain unattainable to heavy, delicate electric actuation.
Ken Goldberg teaches and supervises research in Robotics, Automation, and New Media. Ken holds dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania (1984) and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (1990). He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1995 and is Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, with secondary appointments in EECS, the School of Information, Art Practice, and the UCSF Dept of Radiation Oncology. Ken and his co-authors have published over 200 peer-reviewed technical papers on algorithms for robotics, automation, and social information filtering, and he holds eight U.S. patents. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media, Co-Founder and CTO of Hybrid Wisdom Labs, Co-Founder of the Moxie Institute, and Founding Director of UC Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series. Ken’s art installations, based on his research, have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial, the Berkeley Art Museum, the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Pompidou Center, the Buenos Aires Biennial, and the ICC in Tokyo. Ken has co-written three award-winning Sundance documentary films, “The Tribe”, “Yelp”, and “Connected: An Autoblogography of Love, Death, and Technology.” He is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Ken was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship by President Clinton in 1995, the National Science Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1994, the Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award in 2000, and was elected IEEE Fellow in 2005.
Marc Raibert is the executive director of The AI Institute, a new Hyundai-owned research lab devoted to advancing both the intelligence of robots and their physical skills. He is also the chairman of Boston Dynamics, which he founded in 1992. Prior to Boston Dynamics, Raibert was a professor of computer science at CMU and MIT, where he created the Leg Laboratory, a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots. Raibert is a Founding Fellow of AAAI, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was named Pioneer in Robotics in 2022 by IEEE and received the Engelberger Award in Technology. Two of Raibert’s robots, the One-legged Hopper and BigDog, were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame.
Melonee Wise is the CTO of Agility Robotics. Melonee has a deep history in developing autonomous robots and advancing the robotics industry as we know it today. Prior to joining Agility in 2023, Melonee was the Vice President of Robotics Automation at Zebra Technologies. She was CEO of Fetch Robotics until its acquisition by Zebra Technologies in 2021. Melonee was the second employee at Willow Garage where she led a team of engineers developing next-generation robot hardware and software, including ROS, the PR2, and TurtleBot. Melonee serves as the Chair of the IFR Service Robot Group, as a robotics board member for A3, and on the MHI Roundtable Advisory Committee. Melonee has received many accolades and awards including the MIT Technology Review TR35, Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Women of Influence and 40 Under 40, Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s 2021 Supply Chain Woman of the Year, the 2022 Engelberger award, and as one of eight CEOs changing the way we work by Business Insider. Melonee received a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Physics Engineering and a MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois.
Nima Keivan is CTO of Canvas Technology. Canvas is utilizing Spatial AI to power autonomous systems in dynamic and chaotic environments. Canvas robots see their environment in rich 3D by using cameras to map, localize, and perceive, enabling intelligent and safe behavior indoors or out and in GPS-denied environments. Canvas builds their own autonomous vehicles and licenses their technology to transform industrial vehicles from other companies into intelligent autonomous systems. In addition to co-founding Canvas, Nima has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on visual-inertial dense and sparse SLAM as well as planning and control for agile autonomous ground vehicles.
Noah is the founder and CEO of Built Robotics, a company building automated guidance systems for heavy equipment. He founded the company in 2016, and has raised over $48 million from leading Silicon Valley investors including Founders Fund, NEA and Next47. Previously, Noah founded an ecommerce startup called Twice, which raised $23 million from Andreessen Horowitz before eBay acquired it in 2015. Noah began his career at Google, and he studied business and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, but his first job was working as a carpenter’s helper for his dad, helping to renovate old houses in rural New England.
Raquel Urtasun is the Founder and CEO of Waabi, the leader in Physical AI. Raquel is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and co-founded the Vector Institute for AI. Over her 25 year career within AI, she has been the recipient of several high profile and prestigious awards including a Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award), an Everingham Prize, an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, two NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Awards, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two Best Paper Awards at CVPR, the leading conference in computer vision, and more. In 2026, she was named to the Inc. Female Founders List and was named a fellow of The Royal Society. In 2025, she was included on Fast Company’s AI 20 and The Observer’s Power Index. In 2024, she was named a fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. In 2023, she was awarded the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Emerging Tech CEO Award, Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023) and the Order of Ontario, the highest civilian honor in the province. She has published more than 200 papers in AI, which have been cited more than 100,000 times, giving her an h-index of 132, and she has filed more than 150 patents in AI for self-driving. Prior to founding Waabi, Raquel was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG and a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Raquel received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley.
Sterling Anderson is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Aurora, the company delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. A longtime developer of autonomous vehicle technology, Sterling developed the MIT Intelligent Co-Pilot, a shared autonomy framework that paved the way for broad advances in cooperative control of human-machine systems. In 2014, he joined Tesla, where he led the design, development, and launch of the Tesla Model X and then led the team that delivered Tesla Autopilot. Sterling holds several patents and over a dozen publications in autonomous vehicle systems and earned his Masters and Ph.D. from MIT.