"This talk describes the ambitious dream of Dr. Alaa Maalouf to live in a world full of autonomy.
It explains how AI (as the brains) and robots (as the bodies) can work together in an orchestra toward making it a reality by creating a collaborative lifestyle between robots and human beings.
It reveals huge progress in the field by showing how to leverage what is known as multi-modal foundation models and adapt them to robot tasks, enabling (i) generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios (e.g., autonomous cars can drive in a previously unseen road), (ii) text integration for enabling robot behaviors via text instructions, and (iii) policy debugging and data augmentation via text.
It ends with a call to create a foundation model tailored to robotic tasks bringing us even closer to this exciting future, emphasizing that this dream is not that ambitious."
AI, Life, Robots, Technology "Dr. Alaa Maalouf is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT CSAIL, working with CSAIL director Prof. Daniela Rus. He is also an associate at Harvard SEAS, and a machine learning researcher at project CETI.
Before that, he obtained his PhD. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa, where he was supervised by Prof. Dan Feldman.
He worked at several tech companies and startups including Mellanox Technologies (acquired by NVIDIA) as a chip design engineer, and DataHeroes as a lead machine learning researcher.
In 2025, Dr. Maalouf will be joining the University of Haifa as the Neubauer assistant professor of Computer Science." This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx