Dieter Fox, the former head of Nvidia’s robotics research lab in Seattle, has joined the nonprofit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) to lead a new initiative.
“I’ll be building a robotics team focused on foundation models for robotics — drawing on AI2’s strengths in language, vision, and embodied reasoning,” Fox said in a LinkedIn post.
Fox, a longtime computer science professor at the University of Washington, joined Nvidia in 2017 to open the tech giant’s robotics lab near the UW.
Ai2, founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has deep ties to the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, including several UW faculty who are also Ai2 research leaders.
The new team’s initial efforts will “center on building simulation environments to explore model architectures and data types required to enable robots to operate across diverse real-world settings,” an Ai2 spokesperson told GeekWire via email.
“These environments, benchmarks, and datasets will be openly shared with the research community to support rigorous, reproducible investigation into robot foundation models,” the spokesperson added.
Fox noted on LinkedIn that the team is looking to hire “exceptional researchers, engineers, and interns with backgrounds in vision-language models; simulation and planning; and large-scale training for reasoning and control.”
Fox will continue teaching as a professor with the Allen School. He joined the university in 2000 and is the head of the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab, or RSE-Lab. Fox, who grew up in Germany, previously ran an Intel research lab in Seattle for a brief time while also working at the UW.
In 2017, Fox was tapped to create the Nvidia Seattle Robotics Lab after meeting the semiconductor juggernaut’s CEO, Jensen Huang, in Honolulu that year. The two were attending the annual CVPR conference, which brings together experts in computer vision.
“Since then, Nvidia Robotics has grown from a small research effort into a significant force in both industrial and humanoid robotics,” Fox said in his post. “I’m immensely proud of what we built: a world-class robotics research team tackling object manipulation, motion generation, simulation-based training, human-robot collaboration, synthetic data generation, and generative AI for robotics.”
Yash Narang, who was running the lab’s simulation and behavior generation team, will take over as leader of Nvidia’s Seattle Robotics Lab.
Silicon Valley-based Nvidia, which hit a $4 trillion market capitalization this week, has corporate offices in Seattle and Redmond. Last year it acquired OctoAI, a Seattle AI infrastructure startup co-founded by Luis Ceze, another UW computer science professor.
Editor’s note: Story updated to add a statement from Ai2.