Ashutosh Saxena
Microsoft Fellow | Sloan Fellow | MIT TR35
Dr. Saxena received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence with Andrew Ng from Stanford University. He went on to become an accomplished professor at Cornell University. He co-founded Katapult (NSDQ: KPLT), Brain of Things ($8 million ARR), and Caspar AI (Top 100 AI Companies).
Dr. Saxena's expertise is in Agentic AI for Autonomous Systems like robots, cars and healthcare. He has published about a hundred papers in top venues like NeurIPS, ICML & CVPR, with numerous best paper awards and 20,000+ citations. His work on Large-scale models for robotics was awarded the 10-year test of time award in 2023.
Awards
- Test of Time 10-year award, Robotics Science & Systems, 2023 for Large-scale AI for Robots
- The 50-years of Shakey at AAAI-RSS Blue Sky Ideas award
- Co-chair, IEEE Tech Committee on Robot Learning. Associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Robotics
- Best Cognitive Robotics paper, IROS'14 and ICRA'17. Best student paper, CVPR'16 and RSS'13.
Fellowships
- Microsoft Faculty Fellow
- Sloan Fellow
- MIT TR35 award
- Eight Innovators to Watch, Smithsonian Institution.
- Google Faculty Research Award
- NSF Career award
- Robotics Science & Systems Career Award, 2014 (Talk)
Corporate Recognitions
- Top 100 AI Companies by CB Insights for Caspar.AI
- MIT Technology Review, 10 Breakthrough Technologies - Wikipedia for Robots
- San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40, 2020.
- Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies, SF Business Times, Brain of Things - Homes as Robots.
- World Technology Award
Corporate Initiatives
Co-founder, CEO & Chief AI Officer
Caspar's Embodied GenAI for pro-active healthcare & 20+ health markers.
Katapult (NSDQ:KPLT), Co-founder
AI models which shoppers will pay. Katapult goes public, at $1 billion.
Holopad: TinTin, Chief Scientist
Steven Spielberg's movie Tintin reimagines how we engage in 3D with what was once a static printed book.
Research Initiatives
Large-scale AI for Robots
Cross-attention multi-modal AI to embed visual, 3D, and plans into one single model.
One of 10 innovative technologies by MIT Tech Review - "Wikipedia for Robots"
Massive Online Brain for All the World’s Robots, Wired. New York Times.
Brain4Cars
End-to-end models for autonomous navigation.
Brain4Cars: Car Predicts Driving Mistakes Before They Happen. CNN'15.
Why a robot is better with one eye than two? New Scientist.
Robot Learning
AI for Robotics Perception & planning: 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.
Make3D
Ground-breaking work that extracted 3D depths from a single still image.
Make3D: Turn a 2D Picture Into a 3D Model. Techcrunch. Also New Scientist.
PhD Students
Yun Jiang, Perception Director, Cruise
Generative Models for 3D Perception & Manipulation. Hallucinating robots. Kurzweil AI.
Congcong Li, Director of Engg, Waymo
Large-scale AI with Deep Cascades for Holistic Scene Understanding.
Ashesh Jain, CEO & Co-founder, Coram AI
Best student paper CVPR'16. Supermarket Robots, BBC News. Car Predicts Driving Mistakes Before They Happen. Discovery News.
Chenxia Wu, Staff SWE, Google AI Gemini
Large Scale 3D Scene and Video Understanding.This Robot Uses Machine Learning to Take Care of Absent-Minded Humans, IEEE Spectrum.