About

Founder and Executive Director
Marc Raibert is responsible for the Institute's strategic roadmap, which is aimed at creating future generations of advanced robots and the world’s smartest and most capable intelligent machines. Prior to the Institute, he founded Boston Dynamics and was a professor of computer science at CMU and MIT, where he created the Leg Laboratory, a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots.

Chief Technology Officer
Al Rizzi has 25 years of experience building a menagerie of cool dynamic robots. As CTO of the Institute, he guides the technical fearlessness and fundamental thinking that underlies the organization’s mission. Previously, Al served as Chief Scientist at Boston Dynamics, and was a member of the faculty of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

VP, Strategic Projects & Research
Jessica Hodgins oversees strategic projects at the Institute. She also serves as Professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to her work at the Institute, Jessica also led research labs for Disney and for Meta.

Chief Operating Officer
Ben Lubetsky brings 30 years of experience in building and leading high-performing teams across operations and business development in a range of technology areas, from virtual reality to enterprise communications. Ben has served in roles including VP of Business Development at MAK Technologies and VP of Partner Operations at Vertical Communications.

VP, People Operations
Renee Kennedy is a people and talent leader passionate about building organizations in disruptive technology environments. Previously she was Head of People at Optimus Ride, an Autonomous Vehicle startup, and a Global TA leader at Amazon, supporting the rapid growth of the Alexa AI/Science Organization. She is inspired by companies that create products that positively impact people’s lives.

VP, Finance
Ann Marie Strong comes to the Institute with 20+ years of experience in finance and deep expertise in FP&A, accounting and treasury, and reporting and analysis. Starting her career with Ernst and Young, she has grown as a finance leader in early stage startups and nonprofits, both nationally and internationally.

Director of Zurich Office
Marco Hutter leads the Institute’s Zurich office, while serving as Professor for Robotics at ETH Zurich and Director of the ETH Center for Robotics. Prior to his work at the Institute, he co-founded several robotics startups. His research focuses on the development of novel machines and actuation concepts, together with the underlying control, planning, and machine learning algorithms for agile legged locomotion and manipulation.

Northeastern University
Rob Platt is Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He works at the intersection of machine learning, perception, and robotic manipulation, with a focus on reliability and adaptability in unstructured environments.

Brown
Stefanie Tellex is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. She studies human-robot collaboration, natural language understanding, and artificial intelligence. Her work at the AI Institute focuses on foundation models for navigation and skill learning.

Yale
Aaron Dollar is Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and Computer Science at Yale University, where he serves as the lead investigator of the GRAB Lab. At the Institute, he works on hardware design for robot manipulation.

MIT
Sangbae Kim is Director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research focuses on bio-inspired robot development achieved by extracting principles from animals. At the Institute he advises projects that are developing innovative machine designs.

Northeastern University
Peter Whitney is Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and a member of the Institute for Experiential Robotics. At the AI Institute he is assisting with work on a new generation of light, swift, and gentle robot hands and arms for dexterous mobile manipulation.

MIT
Julie Shah is the H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, faculty director of MIT's Industrial Performance Center, and director of the Interactive Robotics Group, which aims to imagine the future of work by designing collaborative robot teammates that enhance human capability.

CMU
Chris Atkeson brings expertise from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, where he is a professor. His work at the AI Institute focuses on capturing the human techniques that apply to various tasks, so that robots can watch, understand, and then do actions typically performed by people.

CMU
Howie Choset is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University where he serves as the Co-director of the Biorobotics Lab. Howie's research aims to reduce complicated high-dimensional problems found in robotics to low-dimensional simpler ones for design, analysis, and planning.

UT Austin
Luis Sentis is Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. His research is centered on high performance control, embodiment and intelligence of human-centered robots, as well as community oriented robots.

CMU
Deva Ramanan is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. His lab focuses on computer vision, visual understanding, and perception for autonomy. At the AI Institute, he works on visual foundation models that enable interactions in the physical world.