Professor Pieter Abbeel of the University of California, Berkeley, presents the "Artificial Intelligence for Robotic Butlers and Surgeons" keynote at the April 2013 Embedded Vision Summit. Professor Abbeel received a BS/MS in Electrical Engineering from KU Leuven (Belgium) and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008. He joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in Fall 2008, with an appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Professor Abbeel has developed apprenticeship learning algorithms which have enabled advanced helicopter aerobatics which only exceptional human pilots can perform. His group has also enabled the first end-to-end completion of reliably picking up a crumpled laundry article and folding it. He has won numerous varied awards, which you can read about in detail in his bio on the UC Berkeley website. His work has been featured in many popular press outlets, and his current research focuses on robotics and machine learning with a particular focus on challenges in personal robotics, surgical robotics and connectomics.
