Pieter Abbeel
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Pieter Abbeel is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab at 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 ...
. He is also the co-founder of Covariant, a venture-funded start-up that aims to teach robots new, complex skills, and co-founder of Gradescope, an online grading system that has been implemented in over 500 universities across the USA. He is best known for his cutting-edge research in
robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...
and
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
, particularly in
deep reinforcement learning {{Short description, Subfield of machine learning Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a subfield of machine learning that combines principles of reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning. It involves training agents to make decisions by interac ...
. In 2021, he joined AIX Ventures as an Investment Partner. AIX Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups.


Early life and education

Abbeel was born in
Antwerp, Belgium Antwerp (; ; ) is a city and a municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of Antwerp Province, and the third-largest city in Belgium by area at , after Tournai and Couvin. With a population of 565,039, ...
in 1977. He grew up in nearby suburb
Brasschaat Brasschaat () is a municipality located in Flanders, one of the three regions of Belgium, and in the Flemish province of Antwerp. The municipality only comprises the town of Brasschaat proper. In November 2006, Brasschaat won the LivCom-Award 20 ...
. As a high school student at , Abbeel played on the club basketball team. He went on to play on the basketball team of
KU Leuven University KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Founded in 1425, it is the oldest university in Belgium and the oldest university in the Low Countries. In addition to its main campus ...
, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering in 2000. Abbeel received his Ph.D. in computer science 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 ...
. He specialized in
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
research, noting that his interest in AI sparked from the realization that AI can help build tools for other disciplines and that intelligence sets humans apart from other species. Originally, Abbeel intended to pursue a master's degree in computer science, but decided to stay for his Ph.D. due to the abundance of AI projects happening at Stanford. He was the first PhD student of AI Professor
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 ...
, who was a first-year professor at Stanford at the time. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2008, Abbeel became an assistant professor in Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science department. 


Career

Upon his arrival at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor, Abbeel founded the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. Additionally, in 2014, he co-founded Gradescope with other UC Berkeley-affiliated engineers Arjun Singh, Sergey Karayev, Ibrahim Awwal, which was acquired by TurnItIn in 2018.  In 2016, Abbeel joined
OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...
, where he has published numerous articles on
reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learnin ...
,
robot learning Robot learning is a research field at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. It studies techniques allowing a robot to acquire novel skills or adapt to its environment through learning algorithms. The embodiment of the robot, situated i ...
, and
unsupervised learning Unsupervised learning is a framework in machine learning where, in contrast to supervised learning, algorithms learn patterns exclusively from unlabeled data. Other frameworks in the spectrum of supervisions include weak- or semi-supervision, wh ...
. Also in 2016, he became co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, which consists of post-doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students interested in machine learning and robotics. He also founded Berkeley Open Arms, which has licenses the IP on the Blue Robot project from Berkeley. In 2017, he became a full-time professor with tenure at UC Berkeley. In October 2017, Abbeel and three of his students, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang, co-founded Covariant (formerly named Embodied Intelligence). Based in
Emeryville, California Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley, California, Berkeley and Oakland, California, Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisc ...
, Covariant launched in January 2020 and was covered in, among others, New York Times, Wired, MIT Technology Review, and IEEE Spectrum. The company currently has $147M in funding. The website discloses that the team is building a universal AI to help robots see, reason, and on the world around them using deep imitation learning and deep reinforcement learning. Currently, in addition to his research, Abbeel teaches upper-division and graduate classes on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Deep Unsupervised Learning. Abbeel also hosts a weekly podcast, The Robot Brains, featuring experts in AI and robotics.


References


External links

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Google Scholar Profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Abbeel, Pieter Living people American roboticists Sloan Research Fellows UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Stanford University School of Engineering alumni KU Leuven alumni 1977 births Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers