Ashutosh Saxena

Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and Microsoft Faculty Fellow.

Ashutosh Saxena is the Co-Founder and CEO of a high-tech startup Caspar.AI, with Prof. David Cheriton (Co-founder and Chief Scientist). Here is an article in MIT Technology Review. Caspar is an artificial intelligence company that automates peoples' homes to provide a safe comfortable living environment for seniors and families, with applications such as fall detectors.

Previously, Ashutosh spent four years as an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he founded Robot Learning Lab and co-founded Cognical Katapult. His vision is to build artificial intelligence for embodied systems such as robots, cars and homes. He received his PhD (talk) from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence with Prof. Andrew Ng (advisor), Prof. Sebastian Thrun, Prof. Daphne Koller, and Prof. Stephen Boyd.

See some popular press articles here, and research articles here.

 

Awards

  • Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in the Bay Area, SF Business Times, 2020.
  • CB Insights AI Top 100 for Caspar.AI, 2020.
  • San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40, 2020.
  • TR35 Innovator award by MIT Technology Review, 2018.
  • Eight Innovators to Watch in 2015, Smithsonian Institution.
  • World Technology Award, 2015.
  • MIT Technology Review, 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016.
  • Co-founder, Cognical Katapult, 2012-14.
  • The 50-years of Shakey at AAAI-RSS Blue Sky Ideas award, 2015.
  • RSS Early Career Award, 2014. (Talk)
  • NSF Career award, 2013.
  • Microsoft Faculty Fellow, 2012.
  • Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, 2011.
  • Best Cognitive Robotics paper, IROS'14. Best student paper, CVPR'16 and RSS'13.
  • CUAir at AUVSI'12: First prize, mission performance.
  • Google Faculty Research Award, 2012.

Caspar.AI

Caspar.AI enables senior communities to provide safe, healthy, and engaged living experiences to their residents. By Brain of Things.

2020 CB Insights AI 100 List of Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Startups

A Robotic Home That Knows, MIT Technology Review cover story, March 10, 2016.

RoboBrain: Cloud Robotics

An Engine for Robots to Share Knowledge learned from Intenet, from videos, and from other robots. One of 10 innovative technologies by MIT Tech Review.

The Plan to Build a Massive Online Brain for All the World’s Robots, Wired '14.

Brainy, Yes, but Far From Handy. John Markoff, New York Times '14.

Robot Learning

Prof. Saxena's group developed new machine learning techniques for robots: RoboBarista, TellMeDave, et al. The 50-years of Shakey at AAAI-RSS Blue Sky Ideas award.

Robot bartender can read your mind, Fox News'13. Also the Daily Show.

Cats, Robot Baristas, Tricorders, and the Future of Deep Learning. Huffington Post '15.

Holopad: TinTin, Chief Scientist

Steven Spielberg introduces the Art of the Adventures of Tintin App, with Holopad. Holopad evolves books into the digital age by re-imagining how we can engage and interact with what was once a static printed book.

TinTin iPad Art Book Blurs The Line Between Books, Movies, And Apps. Techcrunch.

Brain4Cars

Machine Learning for Smart Car Cabins. Saxena's group developed Deep Learning techniques that anticipate driver's actions before they happen, using cameras.

New Technology May Prevent Accidents By Reading Drivers' Body Language, Forbes '15.

Brain4Cars: Car Predicts Driving Mistakes Before They Happen. CNN'15.

Zunavision, Co-founder & CTO

We enable content owners to assign ad-spaces inside the physical space of their videos, ready for advertiser branding.

Embed Ads In User-Generated Videos With ZunaVision. New York Times. ABC News.

PhD Students

Yun Jiang

Yun Jiang, 2014 McMullen Fellow

Hallucinating Humans: Learning Infinite Latent CRFs for 3D Perception and Mobile Manipulation.

Getting 'hallucinating' robots to arrange your room for you. Kurzweil AI.

Hema Koppula

Hema Koppula, 2015 Google PhD Fellow, best student paper RSS'13.

Modeling Humans from multi-modal data, anticipate their future actions, and have robots collaborate with them.

Robot bartender can read your mind, Fox News'13. Also the Daily Show.

Ashesh Jain

Ashesh Jain, 2016 best student paper CVPR'16.

Learning and Sharing Knowledge for Robots: RoboBrain, PlanIt and Brain4Cars

Robots 'to work in supermarkets', BBC News '13.

Car Predicts Driving Mistakes Before They Happen. Discovery News '15.

Chenxia Wu

Chenxia Wu, 2016  

Google Excellence Scholar '12. Unsupervised 3D Scene and Video Understanding.

Watch-n-Patch, This Robot Uses Machine Learning to Take Care of Absent-Minded Humans, IEEE Spectrum.

Jaeyong Sung

Jaeyong Sung, 2017  

RoboBarista: Learning Maniplation Skills from Videos. The 50-years of Shakey at AAAI-RSS Blue Sky Ideas award, 2015.

Crowdsourcing a coffee-pouring, juice-making robot. Wired '15.

Changxi Zheng

Changxi Zheng, 2012

Robot Manipulation. Doug James' PhD student in graphics, now assistant professor at Columbia University.

Robot smart enough to clean your room (but not to have excuse to get out of it). NBC News '12.

Dipendra Misra

Dipendra Misra(MS, 2015)

Tell Me Dave: Large-scale crowdsourcing for learning robot language.

New robot learns from plain speech, not computer code. LA Times '14.

Congcong Li

Congcong Li, 2012

Large-scale computer vision with Cascaded Classification Models. And aesthetics (with Prof. Tsuhan Chen)

Zhaoyin Jia

Zhaoyin Jia, 2013 with Tsuhan Chen

3D Scene Understanding with Physics.