I'm currently the founder and CEO of Ixian Robotics, where we're deploying intelligent robots to help reindustrialize America.
Before founding Ixian, I was an Engineering Fellow at Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund (is this american dynamism?), investing in robots + manufacturing and working on various robotics projects; on Persona AI's founding team, working on robot manipulation for industrial humanoids; and one of the first ML hires at Armada AI, working on computer vision applications. I've also interned at Amazon (healthcare NLP pre-ChatGPT), Shield AI (fighter jet rl policies), PNNL (benchmarking sparse tensor algorithms), and BNL (HPC for COVID research).
I graduated from Purdue CS in December 2023. During undergrad, I did robotics research with Professor Ahmed Qureshi at CoRAL Lab, where I worked on gaze control for visuolinguomotor policies.
Some fun facts:
I love taking risks and non-linear paths in life.
Robots will eventually replace humans in boring and dangerous tasks. This is something we should welcome with open arms, and help accelerate as much as possible.
I'm broadly passionate about using novel advancements in embodied AI to advance our lives. I enjoy working on frontier problems. Most of my work is in learning-based robotic manipulation.
I'm especially interested in companies deploying intelligent robots today. I believe we've crossed the Rubicon, end-to-end manipulation models can already provide real value, even if deployments are still limited. Deployment and fundamental research should move in tandem. Real-world deployments expose the gaps, and research pushes the frontier forward. Deployments should be a larger focus in the robotics community today.
Real-world deployments, even with simpler embodiments, will drive progress in robustness, continual learning, hardware, and supply chain onshoring far faster than purely iterating in a lab.
My other technical interests are in space and defense. I have a gut feeling I'll end up working on space robots once space is commercialized more.
I'll give out microgrants for cool projects sometimes.
Mind Robotics, Gradient Robotics