Pieter Abbeel
Pieter Abbeel | |
|---|---|
| Born | Template:Birth year and age Antwerp, Belgium |
| Occupation(s) | Professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, roboticist, entrepreneur |
| Years active | 2008–present |
| Known for | Co-founder of Covariant and Gradescope, contributions to deep reinforcement learning and robotics |
Pieter Abbeel (born 1977) serves as a professor in electrical engineering and computer sciences and leads the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. He also holds the position of co-director at the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab within the University of California, Berkeley. Abbeel co-established Covariant, a venture-backed startup dedicated to enabling robots to acquire sophisticated skills, as well as Gradescope, an online grading platform utilized by more than 500 universities across the United States. His contributions to the fields of robotics and machine learning, particularly in deep reinforcement learning, have earned him significant recognition. In 2021, he expanded his professional scope by becoming an Investment Partner at AIX Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in artificial intelligence enterprises.
Early life and education
Born in 1977 in Antwerp, Belgium, Abbeel was raised in the suburb of Brasschaat. During his secondary education, he was active in basketball and continued playing while attending KU Leuven University, where he completed both his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering by the year 2000.
Abbeel pursued his doctoral studies in computer science at Stanford University, concentrating on artificial intelligence. His fascination with AI originated from its capacity to develop tools applicable across various fields. Although initially intending to earn only a master's degree, he extended his stay to complete a Ph.D. due to Stanford’s vibrant AI research environment. He was notably the first doctoral student under AI Professor Andrew Ng. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 2008, Abbeel joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor within electrical engineering and computer science.
Career
At UC Berkeley, Abbeel established the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. In 2014, together with fellow engineers, he co-founded Gradescope, which was later acquired by TurnItIn in 2018. By 2016, he became affiliated with OpenAI and contributed extensively to literature on topics including reinforcement learning, robot learning, and unsupervised learning. That same year, he assumed the role of co-director at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab and initiated Berkeley Open Arms, utilizing intellectual property from Berkeley’s Blue Robot initiative. He achieved full professorship with tenure at UC Berkeley in 2017.
In October 2017, Abbeel along with three students—Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang—founded Covariant (initially Embodied Intelligence) based in Emeryville, California. The company publicly launched in January 2020 and has secured $147 million in funding aimed at creating universal AI systems that empower robots to perceive, reason, and interact with their surroundings through deep imitation and reinforcement learning techniques. Covariant has attracted attention from leading media outlets such as The New York Times, Wired, MIT Technology Review, and IEEE Spectrum.
Beyond his research activities, Abbeel instructs advanced courses covering Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Deep Unsupervised Learning. He is also the host of The Robot Brains podcast, which features prominent experts from AI and robotics disciplines.