Young Investigator, Robotics

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence•Seattle, WA

9h•Onsite

About The Position

The Allen AI Young Investigator is a postdoctoral program offering unique benefits. The program will enable you to balance working collaboratively on an Ai2 project while pursuing an independent research agenda. Ai2's Robotics team is led by Dieter Fox. We aim to develop and leverage scalable simulation domains to scientifically investigate the scaling and generalization capabilities of foundation models for robotics, and use these insights to develop broadly competent robots. Following a longstanding tradition at Ai2, we are committed to fully open-source research and work toward application domains with a positive impact on society. We are looking for applicants interested in robotics, with a focus on core techniques in robot manipulation, large scale training in simulated environments, sim-to-real transfer, robot foundation models, and skill learning. As a Predoctoral Young Investigator on the Robotics team, you will have the opportunity to work in a variety of research areas including: Robot foundation models – Investigate the scaling and generalization properties of foundation models for robotics, and contribute to developing broadly competent robots that can operate in the real world. Manipulation and skill learning – Develop agents that manipulate objects, follow instructions, and acquire new skills across diverse tasks, in both simulation and on real robot hardware. Simulation and sim-to-real – Build and leverage scalable, GPU-accelerated simulation environments for large-scale training, and develop pipelines that transfer learned policies reliably to real-world robots. Open source research – Make substantial contributions to the fully open methods, datasets, benchmarks, and tools that enable rigorous, reproducible, and distributed experimentation. We regularly publish in high-profile conferences and journals in robotics (CoRL, ICRA, RSS), computer vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV), and machine learning (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML). We collaborate frequently with researchers on other Ai2 teams focused on computer vision, large language models, and others. Our main office has close ties and unique access to researchers at the University of Washington, only 1.5 miles away.

Requirements

Are within one year of completing their PhD, or already have a PhD.
Young Investigator applicants should have a strong foundation (PhD level) in one or more of the research areas listed above.
We look favorably upon extensive work experience and publishing peer reviewed work at top scientific venues in our field including RSS, CoRL, ICRA, NeurIPS, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, etc.