I'm currently working on creating robust manipulation policies for tool use and other industrial tasks at a new humanoid robotics startup called Persona AI. We have an early customer (HD Hyundai for welding in shipyards) and significant capital. Send me an email and apply online if you're interested in joining the team. We're still early, and we're hiring across all levels with significant equity, especially for Machine Learning Scientists and Engineers.
I was the first hire at Persona AI and have been flexing between research, product development, and business operations. It's been a fun ride!
I was previously working on computer vision applications as the first ML hire at Armada AI, and have done internships with Amazon (healthcare NLP before ChatGPT), Shield AI (training fighter jet AI), PNNL (benchmarking sparse tensor algorithms), and BNL (HPC for covid research).
I graduated from Purdue CS in December 2023. My robotics undergraduate research was under Professor Ahmed Qureshi at CoRAL Lab where I worked on adding gaze control to visuolinguomotor policies and did some higher level planning work for a robot tour guide of Purdue.
Some fun facts:
I love taking risks and non-linear paths in life.
AI and 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 integrating embodied AI into our daily lives, and I enjoy working on frontier
problems. Most of my work is learning based.
I'm currently focused on developing robust robotic manipulation policies at Persona AI using robot foundation
models. My
interests include integrating additional modalities (e.g., touch, sound) post-training, figuring out how to best
incorporate visuomotor
policies into larger robotic systems,
and
improving robustness against real-world perturbations. I'm also exploring embodiment free data collection for
learning tool use and ways to reach high levels of robustness.
I'm also interested in high-level reasoning and collaborative decision-making between robots and humans. I like
building things regular people can use.
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 love keeping up with the startup world & am interested in angel investing. Sometimes I'll give out microgrants for cool projects.
I had to figure a lot of stuff out on my own & didn't have a ton of support. If you don't either, and I can help in any way, fill out this form or shoot me an email. I check everything regularly. Pass the torch on later o7