Faculty

Byron Boots is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Washington where he directs the UW Robot Learning Laboratory. He is also a Principal Research Scientist in the Seattle Robotics Lab at NVIDIA Research, and he is co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Robot Learning.

Byron’s group performs fundamental and applied research in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics with a focus on developing theory and systems that tightly integrate perception, learning, and control. This work touches on a range of problems including computer vision, state estimation, localization and mapping, high-speed navigation, motion planning, and robotic manipulation. The algorithms that his group develops use and extend theory from deep learning and neural networks, nonparametric statistics, graphical models, nonconvex optimization, quantum physics, online learning, reinforcement learning, and optimal control. They have been honored with several awards for their work.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Washington, Byron was an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing within the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, and, before that, he was a post-doc in the Robotics and State Estimation Lab directed by Dieter Fox at the University of Washington. Byron received my Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was a member of the Sense, Learn, Act (SELECT) Lab, which was co-directed by Carlos Guestrin and Byron’s advisor Geoff Gordon.