CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

Speaker series to feature trailblazers in autonomy research

Collage of grayscale photos of autonomic devices, including robots with wheels and tracks, a dragonfly-shaped drone, a robotic arm, a humanoid robot, and a rounded self-driving car. Text reads: CITRIS Autonomy Series.

This spring, join CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI) to explore the latest breakthroughs in autonomous systems and robotics. This series will feature academic, civic and industry experts who are pushing the boundaries of innovation in fields from perception and sensing to control systems, and from autonomous navigation to machine learning, and more.

Free and open to the public — no registration necessary! — the talks will take place in Room 250 on the second floor of Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon PT. Seating is first come, first served. 

  • Jan. 28:
    Cathy Wu
    Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    “Learning-guided Optimization for Mobility”
  • Feb. 4: 
    Zhenhui “Jessie” Li
    Chief Scientist, Yunqi Academy of Engineering
    “The Critical Role of Cyber Infrastructure in City Innovation and Beyond”
  • *Feb. 11:
    Vincent Vanhoucke
    Distinguished Engineer, Waymo
    “AI for Autonomous Driving at Scale”
  • Feb. 25:
    Terry Fong
    Chief Roboticist, NASA Ames Research Center; Deputy Rover Manager, VIPER Lunar Mission, NASA
    “The NASA Volatiles Inspecting Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) Mission”
  • March 4:
    Mac Schwager
    Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
    “Perception-rich Robot Autonomy With Neural Environment Models”
  • March 11:
    Jeannette Bohg
    Assistant Professor for Robotics, Stanford University
    “A Vision for Robotics in the Age of Foundation Models”
  • March 18:
    Grace Gao
    Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
    “Towards Autonomous Driving on the Moon”
  • April 1:
    Andrea Bajcsy
    Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
    “Towards Open World Robot Safety”
  • April 15:
    Dorsa Sadigh
    Associate Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
    “The Data Problem for Pre- and Post-training of Robotics Foundation Models”
  • *April 22:
    Russ Tedrake
    Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Vice President of Robotics Research, Toyota Research Institute
    “Large Behavior Models: Testing Specific Hypotheses About Multitask Learning for Dexterous Manipulation”
  • April 29:
    Ricardo Sanfelice
    Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz; Director, CITRIS Aviation
    “Hybrid Systems Methods to Enable Use of AI-driven Algorithms: Formal Guarantees for Robustness and Performance”

*The UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) is co-sponsoring the presentations by Tedrake and Vanhoucke.