Bio

Jonathan Francis is a Senior Research Scientist at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI), in Pittsburgh, where he leads the Robot Learning Lab—focused on developing dexterous robots that extend the capabilities of humans in industrial and household environments. He is also a Courtesy Faculty at the Robotics Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), as well as the Robotics Research Program Lead in the Carnegie-Bosch Institute, College of Engineering, at CMU. His research includes topics in the areas of Robot Learning, Embodied AI, Neuro-symbolic Reasoning, and Machine Learning theory (e.g., Multimodal Representation Learning, Transfer Learning, and Reinforcement Learning). Jonathan has extensive experience in industrial deployments of AI/ML/Robotics methods to indoor environments and has established strong connections to the manufacturing industrial research sector for co-development, through, e.g., the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center on Human Augmentation via Dexterity and the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute in North America. Jonathan has published over 50 research articles in Robotics, AI/ML, Sensing, and Automation conference and journal venues, and he holds over 30 granted and provisional patents in multiple countries. He frequently serves as an Area Chair, Associate Editor, Scientific Advisory Board member, and Technical Program Committee member of various Robotics, Machine Learning, and AI conference and journal publication venues, and he is a consistent lead organizer of various academic workshops, tutorials, and special meetings. Jonathan's team has won several challenges and best paper awards at various academic venues, such as IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), IEEE-ITS International Automated Vehicle Validation Conference (IAVVC), HomeRobot Open-Vocab Mobile Manipulation Challenge at IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), and Argoverse Motion Forecasting Competition at IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Jonathan is responsible for a diverse portfolio of BCAI and CMU research projects, cross-institutional collaborations, student and junior researcher advisees, and publicly-funded activities. Jonathan received his Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at CMU and his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at CMU.