Ashutosh Saxena is an

Indian-American Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from India. The terms Asian Indian and East Indian are used to avoid confusion with Native Americans in the United States, who are also referred to as "Indians" or "Am ...

computer scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and large-scale robot learning. His interests include building enterprise AI agents and embodied AI. Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of Caspar.AI, where generative AI parses data from ambient 3D radar sensors to predict 20+ health & wellness markers for pro-active patient care. Prior to Caspar.AI, Ashutosh co-founded Cognical Katapult (NSDQ: KPLT), which provides a no credit required alternative to traditional financing for online and omni-channel retail. Before Katapult, Saxena was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and faculty director of the RoboBrain Project (a large-scale AI model for robotics) at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

Education

In 2009, with artificial intelligence pioneer

Andrew Ng Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (; born April 18, 1976) is a British-American computer scientist and Internet Entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and ...

as his advisor, Saxena received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. Saxena received his bachelor's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the

Indian Institute of Technology The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are a network of engineering and technology institutions in India. Established in 1950, they are under the purview of the Ministry of Education of the Indian Government and are governed by the Instit ...

Kanpur Kanpur (Hindustani language, Hindustani: ), originally named Kanhapur and formerly anglicized as Cawnpore, is the second largest city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Uttar Pradesh after Lucknow. It was the primary ...

in 2004.

Career

Saxena was the chief scientist of New York-based Holopad, where he worked with Steven Spielberg's team to create walkthroughs and 3D experiences for his movie ''TinTin''. His past experiences include building acoustic AI models at

Bose Corporation Bose Corporation () is an American manufacturing company that predominantly sells audio equipment. The company was established by Amar Bose in 1964 and is based in Framingham, Massachusetts. It is best known for its Home audio, home audio syste ...

. Once Ashutosh completed his undergraduate degree, he became a researcher at the

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency that is responsible for scientific research and its commercial and industrial applications. CSIRO works with leading organisations arou ...

, where he developed AI models for medical devices. Before Caspar, Saxena pursued other entrepreneurial ventures, such as ZunaVision, an artificial intelligence startup he co-founded with

that uses AI to embed advertising space within videos. Ashutosh served as the CTO of ZunaVision from 2008 to 2010. After ZunaVision, Saxena co-founded Cognical Katapult, which provided financing solutions to nonprime and underbanked consumers powered by artificial intelligence. From 2014 to 2016, Saxena served as the faculty director of the RoboBrain project, which was a joint venture that he started between

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

, and the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

that made a

knowledge engine A knowledge engine is part of a decision-support system that combines data with data models and inference rules to provide an interface for people who want to make decisions or discover related data. It may involve automatically extracting and s ...

for robots. Saxena co-founded Brain of Things in 2015 with

David Cheriton David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group. ...

, who serves as chief scientist, and was listed as the fastest growing private company reaching an annual recurring revenue of $8 million in three years. It has been widely covered in several outlets including Forbes Japan, and MIT Technology Review. Saxena's work on deep learning won test of time award in 2023 by Robotics Science and Systems. Ashutosh has been recognized for his work by receiving the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2011, Google Faculty Research Award in 2012,

Microsoft Faculty Fellow Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

ship in 2012,

NSF Career award The National Science Foundation CAREER award is the most prestigious award presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States Federal Government to support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through rese ...

in 2013, One of the Eight Innovators to Watch by the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

in 2015, and received TR35 Innovator Award by

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

in 2018. He was named by San Francisco Business Times as a 40 under 40 young business leader.

Research

Saxena has authored over 100 published papers in the areas of large-scale robot learning and artificial intelligence, with 20,000+ citations. His work in the fields of

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

and

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

have been featured in press releases and academic journal reviews. Ashutosh's early work includes the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR), an AI models that enables to perform tasks such as unload items from a dishwasher, which was covered on the front-page of New York Times. His work on Make3D, was the first work that estimated 3D depth from a single still image. At Cornell University, Ashutosh led the Robot Learning Lab, which used a machine learning approach to train robots to perform tasks in human environments such as generalizing manipulation in 3D point-clouds where robots learn to transfer manipulation trajectories to novel objects utilizing a large sample of demonstrations from crowdsourcing.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saxena, Ashutosh Stanford University alumni Living people Artificial intelligence researchers American roboticists Machine learning researchers Indian emigrants to the United States Year of birth missing (living people)