Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Pieter Abbeel joined covariant.ai as Co-Founder, President, Chief Scientist in 2017. Pieter Abbeel is Professor at UC Berkeley [2008- ], Co-Founder covariant.ai [2017- ], Co-Founder Gradescope [2014- ], Research Scientist at OpenAI [2016-2017], Founding Faculty Partner AI@TheHouse, Advisor to many AI/Robotics start-ups. He works in machine learning and robotics, in particular his research focuses on making robots learn from people (apprenticeship learning), how to make robots learn through their own trial and error (reinforcement learning), and how to speed up skill acquisition through learning-to-learn (meta-learning). His robots have learned advanced helicopter aerobatics, knot-tying, basic assembly, organizing laundry, locomotion, and vision-based robotic manipulation. He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICML, NIPS and ICRA, early career awards from NSF, Darpa, ONR, AFOSR, Sloan, TR35, IEEE, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Pieter's work is frequently featured in the popular press, including New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Tech Review, NPR.