Pieter Abbeel received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008 and is currently on the faculty at UC Berkeley in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He has won various awards, including best paper awards at ICML and ICRA, the Sloan Fellowship, the AFOSR-YIP, the ONR-YIP, the DARPA-YFA, the NSF-CAREER, the MIT TR35, and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award. His work enabled autonomous helicopter aerobatics at a level only exceptional human pilots can perform, and enabled the first end-to-end completion of reliably picking up a crumpled laundry article and folding it. His current research focuses on optimization and machine learning for robotics.

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