Events Calendar

Center of Autonomy and AI, Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things, and Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series

Speaker: Vikas Sindhwani, Google Brain

Talk Title: Foundation Models for Robotics

Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

Abstract: Trained on internet-scale datasets, large language and vision models demonstrate breakthrough capabilities which until recently were thought to still be decades away in technological feasibility. Does this imply a paradigm shift in Robotics as well? If so, what is the bridge from symbols and tokens on the internet to actions in the physical world? Through a few illustrative vignettes of robotic manipulation and navigation research at Google, I will propose speculative paths towards making robots useful in human-centric spaces.

Biography: Vikas Sindhwani is Senior Staff Research Scientist in the Google Brain team in New York where he leads a research group focused on solving a range of planning, perception, learning, and control problems arising in Robotics. His interests are broadly in core mathematical foundations of statistical learning, and in end-to-end design aspects of building large-scale, robust machine intelligence systems. He received the best paper award at Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2013, the IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Award in 2014, and was finalist for Outstanding Planning Paper Award at ICRA-2022. He serves on the editorial board of Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; he has been area chair and senior program committee member for NeurIPS, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) and Knowedge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). He previously led a team of researchers in the Machine Learning group at IBM Research, NY. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a B.Tech in Engineering Physics from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai. His publications are available at: http://vikas.sindhwani.org/.

Host: Somil Bansal, somilban@usc.edu

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ySGInGwKRKKHX7NHJwTk3Q

Location: Online

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ySGInGwKRKKHX7NHJwTk3Q

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia White