ISyE Seminar Series: Ashish Kapoor

"NextGen Robotics with Simulation and Pretraining"

Presentation by Ashish Kapoor
General Manager
Autonomous Systems and Robotics, Microsoft Research, Redmond

3:30 pm - Seminar
4:30 pm - Reception, cookies and coffee

About the seminar:

There are fundamental shifts happening due to advances in Deep Learning as well as our ability to harness large amounts of computation on the cloud. Additionally, we are also seeing how Deep Machine Learning is changing the foundation of numerical computing and simulation. We build upon these observations and propose a different way to build robots and autonomous systems. Specifically, I’ll discuss large scale data-driven and differentiable simulations and how they can help us design and train robotic systems. Secondly, I’ll also highlight approaches that utilize large scale pre-trained models and discuss implications towards how we might build robots in the future.

Papers:

Teaching a robot to see and navigate with simulation

Just say the magic word: using language to program robots

PACT: Perception-Action Causal Transformer for Autoregressive Robotics Pretraining

COMPASS: COntrastive Multimodal Pretraining for Autonomous Systems

Bio:

Ashish Kapoor is the Chief Scientist of the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Group  at Microsoft, Redmond. His recent research focuses on safety, pre-training of deep models and data-driven simulation for Autonomous Systems. Ashish has a PhD from MIT and a Bachelor of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.