Bay Area Robotics Symposium

The tentative list of speakers for each talk session is:

Faculty talks #1 (08:00 -- 09:00): Pieter Abbeel, Koushil Sreenath, Dorsa Sadigh, Ken Goldberg, Allison Okamura, Chelsea Finn, Monroe Kennedy.

Faculty talks #2 (10:00 -- 11:00): Grace Gao, Mark Mueller, Dejan Milutinovic, Anca Dragan, Ricardo Sanfelice, Hannah Stuart, Ron Fearing.

Faculty talks #3 (12:15 -- 13:15): Mykel Kochenderfer, Silvio Savarese, Sergey Levine, Mac Schwager, Alexandre Bayen, Marco Pavone.

Keynote Talk by Rodney Brooks: 

Title: Robotics Research Methodology Aimed at Start Ups rather than Academia

Abstract: Academia has ways of evaluating robotics research results which are not necessarily aligned with how useful those results will be in turning them into a successful startup. Some of the most difficult technical challenges at startups will never be accepted as academic research, even though they can be incredibly challenging. But there are ways to tilt academic research projects in ways which will make the results much more useful to startups, especially if the researcher becomes one of the start up founders.

Speaker Bio: Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT. PhD: Stanford. Post-docs: CMU & MIT. Faculty: Stanford & MIT. Director MIT AI Lab and then CSAIL until 2007. Seven startups including iRobot: tens of millions robots in the home, thousands in both the military and factories. Now CTO of Robust.AI, and simultaneously writing a deeply academic book on how AI and neuroscience might still be in their phlogiston phase in a hangover from 1945-1965.