Pieter Abbeel

Pieter Abbeel is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Engineering; Co-Founder/Chief Scientist at Covariant; and host of The Robot Brains Podcast. At Berkeley, Abbeel is Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and Co-Director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence (BAIR) Lab.  Abbeel’s research strives to build ever-more intelligent systems, with the main emphasis on deep-reinforcement learning, deep-unsupervised learning, and robotics. At Covariant, Abbeel helps bring AI robotics into the real world, starting with warehouse automation. Previously, Abbeel co-founded Gradescope, an AI-powered grading system that’s used at over 1,000 schools and was acquired by TurnitIn. Abbeel is an active angel investor in the AI and robotics space. Abbeel has received many awards and honors, including the PECASE, NSF-CAREER, ONR-YIP, Darpa-YFA, TR35, IEEE Fellow.  His work is frequently featured in the press, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, and Tech Review.