This is a long post, mainly because I have a lot to say, but in case you are too busy: TLDR: @Vercept_ai is joining @AnthropicAI! We shared a mission, so we joined forces to accelerate it into reality. Couldn't be more excited! Why Vercept was started In 2024, AI coding tools were already becoming magical for developers, but other industries were ages behind. It felt insane that when my mom had IT issues, I still had to hop on a call and walk her through it step by step. Insane that sending a simple email took so many clicks. That's why we started @Vercept_ai : Build something that acts for users instead of telling them how to do it. Two goals: 1) help people do tasks they didn't know how to do, and 2) handle the zero-brainpower tasks so people spend more time on creative work. As simple as scheduling meetings, as complex as reconciling messy financials before tax season. Ultimate goal was to have people spend less time behind screens and more time walking in nature. (Very Pacific Northwest mission 😁) The ride The journey of building an AI native company in this day and age was wild. Going from researcher to founder meant trading “reviewer number 2” for business partners and users, but surprisingly a lot of the same paradigms applied. Come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment, analyze user behavior, change the model and product based on the findings, wash, rinse and repeat. There are some differences though. The pace and the adrenaline. Lows are low, highs are high. We were constantly being challenged and learned at a pace we had never learned before. NEVER! If you are an adrenaline junkie like we are, it's a blast. The joy of the startup adrenaline rush is truly underrated. Why Anthropic We raised more than $50M, had a comfortable runway and a successful product, were building full steam with a small team, and were truly enjoying every minute of it. But that's when the opportunity came to join forces with Anthropic. We already knew how great Anthropic was at building models and we admired their mission, but then we learned more about the vision. We went on hours of walks, had long conversations, talked to members across different orgs, and learned more about Anthropic's vision and commitment to core beliefs which were very similar to ours. The more we talked, the more we realized we had been working on the same mission but from complementary perspectives. We realized that joining forces meant we could build something much much bigger together. And beyond the mission, I am now a big believer that Anthropic's real moat isn't its best model. It's the people. Incredibly talented folks who genuinely care about mission and real impact over hype. A zero-ego culture obsessed with building something meaningful. The choices were clear: we could build independently and work toward the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality. The decision became an easy choice. What's next for our mission Mission continues, just got a bigger stage and an expanded team. The goal is still to expand AI beyond just a chatbot, to enable non-technical users to leverage it just as much as technical ones. We're just getting started. It takes a village This journey wouldn't have happened without the people who made it what it was. First and foremost, my cofounders @LucaWeihs and @inkynumbers . Best people I could've wished for as cofounders. We never once got into an argument, always had communicative discussions and as a cherry on top shared the same sense of humor! I feel blessed and grateful to have these two in my life. Thankful to our team for trusting in the three of us and showing up day and night. Grateful for @sethbannon , our board member, lead investor, great mentor and the person whose energy is so infectious that whenever we were having a down moment we would say "channel your inner @fiftyyears energy!" And to our wonderful investors and supporters: @chrija and @PointNineCap , Yifan and Jacob and @ai2incubator , and @mattmcilwain and Ted Kummert from @MadronaVentures . Couldn't have done this without you. Onward 🐜

🚨BREAKING: A mysterious virus is spreading. Unfortunately, Ross Girshick (@inkynumbers), @mattdeitke, @LucaWeihs, and I recently got infected. 🦠 This brain-targeting virus causes highly irrational behavior. Common symptoms include: 🛑 Quitting well-paying jobs 🛑 Leaving behind academic awards 🛑 Diving headfirst into the chaos of uncertainty There’s no cure in sight! Side effects: A dangerous amount of FUN. Stay safe, folks… or don’t. You might just end up building something amazing! 🚀 Do you have a new year’s resolution to quit your job? We are hiring, hiring@vercept.com! Wanna know what we are up to? Sign up for updates here: vercept.com

As of a few hours ago, I'm officially a Research Scientist @allen_ai. So excited to start my career working with the amazing researchers at AI2 and PRIOR team.

Congratulations to Ross for winning yet another, Test of Time Award for his high-impact (single author 😲!!!) paper Fast R-CNN! At lunch today, he told us the story behind the paper and his journey and let me tell you, it was FASCINATING. I tried to convince him to share it publicly, but he didn’t agree so I’ll leave it to you all to ask him about it next time you see him! @inkynumbers It’s amazing to work with someone so incredibly smart yet humble. #ICCV2025

I feel awful working on the CVPR deadline and having first-world problems (like OMG my learning curves are ugly!), while my parents, who are both healthcare workers in Iran, keep getting re-infected and getting hospitalized over and over again!

📣 I’m hiring interns for Summer 2024 @allen_ai 🚀! Interested in a cool opportunity? Read this thread! 🧵 Think it's a match? Reach out to me at kianae@allenai.org 📩 #Internship #AI #Robotics

Back in 2016, I submitted my first CVPR paper after pulling an all-nighter—promised myself I’d never do that again and be more prepared next time. Fast forward to last night at 2:30 AM ⏰, still in the office working on Molmo, and realizing I’ve been doing these pre-deadline sprints for 8+ years! 😅 But here’s the thing: it’s not because I have to. I actually love that last-minute adrenaline rush—tweaking, refining, pushing everything out the door just in time. Also, I’m not gonna lie, the fact that the number of jokes made per minute increases exponentially as we get closer to sunrise makes it way more fun 😂.

Introducing our new approach for building robust robots: Phone2Proc! @CVPR 23 Want to boost your sim-to-real agent’s performance from 34% to 70% WITHOUT any real-world finetuning? Are you tired of agents’ poor performance in complex real-world environments?This thread is for you!

Working on CVPR camera-ready with a tiny bit of disturbance... #cvpr2021

At PRIOR @allen_ai, we are working at the X of robotics & CV to build the next generation of household robots. We work on ambitious projects and push boundaries in this field. If you’re interested in being a part of this team, join us! Reach out to me directly! #hiring #tech

🚀 Imitating shortest paths in simulation enables effective navigation and manipulation in the real world. Our findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom! This is a big joint effort from PRIOR @allen_ai (6 first authors!). spoc-robot.github.io/

We are out of stealth! So excited to share what we've been building with the world!🥹

FYI Meta ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) comp rumors are true! 😏 Matt Deitke has left Vercept to join the ASI team at Meta. Matt was one of the important team members in outlining our initial roadmap and he will be missed.😍 Ross, Luca and I and the rest of the Vercept team are fired up about Vercept and fully committed to building the future of the company! 🎉 We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.😅 If you are also excited about the future of computer use, we are hiring.

🎉 I woke up to amazing news! Huge congrats to @RchalYang for winning the Best Paper Award at IROS 2024 #IROS2024! 🏆 Mentoring him has been a joy, and I’m thrilled our work is getting the recognition from the community! 🌟 Check out our paper and website: rchalyang.github.io/Harmonic… #IROS2024

One of the best talk titles I saw at #ICRA2024 And it was a great talk too! @leto__jean

Remedy to avoid the symptoms: drive to a trailhead right after CVPR. Sleep in the car. Wake up at 3:30am. Climb a mountain with exposed rock and steep snow for 6000ft of elevation gain! If 13 hours of being in nature doesn’t fix it nothing would! #BestPostCVPRRecovery

Have you heard the term full-stack researcher? That's what I identify as these days 😂! From data 📊, to architecture design 🏗️, to training a model 🧠, to benchmarking 🧪, and finally making a web app to demo the work 💻! I gotta admit tho, I had forgotten how fun it is to make web apps 😄

Since I moved to the US 7 years ago, I have been going through a lot. Not seeing my family for years, having to leave friends behind, going through an identity crisis as an immigrant,... All this time, I tried to cheer myself by remembering why I immigrated.

We're hiring at 🚀 Vercept (in stealth) - We're building a legendary team to invent the future of how humans and AI work together. We're recruiting founding research scientists, full-stack developers, and front-end / UX developers. We don't care about your credentials, just what you can build. Apply with your resume + a video showcasing your best work. Stack: PyTorch, React, Next.js, TypeScript #PyTorch #NextJS #AI #React #AIStartup More info below: 🧵

Received an email today from the NZ embassy after 5 months of waiting! They are asking if I'm still going to @corl_conf (happened mid-December last year). Always fun to have an Iranian passport! P.S. I still managed to co-organize a workshop, give a talk & join a panel remotely!

This is NOT overreacting! I'm so sad and disappointed too @xiaolonw! My Chinese collaborators have been some of my most hardworking and best colleagues I have had! This slide is just racial bias and is WRONG!

Ani @anikembhavi , I've known you for many years, but in the past four years, I’ve had the chance to work with you more closely. I can’t even count the hours I’ve spent in your office. You've helped me grow, not only as a researcher or manager but also as a person. Today, a few of us were remembering the CVPR deadline night last year. I wish I could have frozen that moment forever. We were all sitting on the floor in your office, and it felt like a grandpa (not to say you're old! :D) was sitting on a chair with his grandkids gathered around, listening to his wisdom. I was right by your desk, and we were laughing so hard at 11 PM that I had tears in my eyes. In that very moment, I felt so grateful and lucky to work with you. You brought us all together. You taught us how to work as a team, collaborate, handle technical disagreements, and come out of them stronger than ever. You helped us build relationships that will last a lifetime. You gave us a work family! You helped me grow in so many ways. You taught me to trust myself, showed me my strengths, and showed me my weaknesses. You brought out the best in me. Your departure leaves a big hole in my heart. You were my mentor, anchor, life coach, on-demand stand-up comedian, and my biggest inspiration. And if, in 10 years, I am even a fraction as good a manager as you are, I’ll be the happiest person in the world! ❤️

Last week at #ECCV2022, I published a first-author paper. Unfortunately, I didn't get to present it in person. With everything going on in life, I forgot to let Twitter know about our project. The idea is to relax the sensory information for mobile object manipulation.

Our paper won Best Paper Honorable Mention @CVPR #CVPR2025 Come listen to @mattdeitke talk about the work in a few minutes in Hall 2A!

🤖#RoboticsAI #RobotLearning! Are we targeting the right robotic tasks? Industrial or home application? Let's dive deep at the CoRL’23 Workshop, Nov 6, 8:30am-12:30pm EST, Hub 1 @corl_conf, Atlanta. Don't miss the flaming debate at 11:50am! 🔥 sites.google.com/view/corl23…

Checkout our #cvpr22 paper. prior.allenai.org/projects/c… Embodied agents need to have a rich representation of the environment they are interacting with. This can be in the form of a scene representation encoding the relationships of the entities in the room.

If you’re at @CVPR and would like to chat about research or visit our beautiful AI2 office (limited capacity) dm me. #CVPR2024

Our Molmo is out! 🎉 It’s more than just a multimodal model! Try it with your robotics applications today with our live web demo! 🤖🚀 molmo.allenai.org

Very happy to announce the Embodied AI Lecture Series @ PRIOR A live lecture and discussion series in Embodied AI with a focus on cross-disciplinary work. Lectures held biweekly Fri 11am PST. Open to all! #embodiedai @allenai Details: prior.allenai.org/lectures

Life update: I left my job to start an exciting new adventure! 🎉 Step 1: Break my foot. 🦶 Apparently, the universe wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to sit and focus on building. 😅

Finally a real hooded doctor after 2 years. Thanks to my advisors for coaching me for 5 + 2 years and counting... 👨‍🎓👩‍🎓👨‍🎓

Visiting Seattle for the first time? As a local (9 years and counting!), here are my top picks: Pike Place Market for fish throwing, jams, chocolates, and a great sandwich spot! maps.app.goo.gl/4wu472LSScRv… Don’t miss the Gum Wall and Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour for some cool history. 🐟🍫🧱🕵️‍♂️

On a roll! Thrilled to start the day with amazing news—our PoliFormer paper just won Best Paper at CoRL! 🎉 Huge congratulations to @LucaWeihs @KuoHaoZeng for leading the charge on this one! #CoRL2024

In PNW we do our brainstorming sessions in remote cabins with the view of the cascades. How do you do yours? #humblebrag An amazing 15-hour day off-site with PRIOR @allen_ai. (Don't worry it wasn't all working. We also had fun activities and games.)

The first season of Embodied AI Lecture Series came to an end last Friday, with a total of 12 amazing speakers, talking about different perspectives towards embodied AI. Message me if you have any suggestions on potential speakers for the next chapter :) prior.allenai.org/lectures

Check out our new work (with Daniel Gordon, Dieter Fox and Ali Farhadi) on unsupervised representation learning from unlabeled YouTube videos. We demonstrate improvements over recent unsupervised techniques and fully supervised ImageNet pretraining. arxiv.org/pdf/2003.07990.pdf

Have you been looking for a framework for visual object manipulation and navigation? Do you need diverse cluttered photo-realistic environments for your manipulation experiments? Search no more! Introducing ManipulaTHOR, our virtual agent with a highly articulated robotic arm.

[Probably My Most Controversial Twitter Thread to Date] I've been debating whether to write this tweet or not. But I know I'll regret it if I don't say anything. Some of this year's review process decisions were downright bizarre! 🤔 Even in the AC workshop, it was clear some groundbreaking papers got snubbed or accepted without proper recognition (DUSt3R, among others). What's going on here? 🚨📉#CVPR2024

@ Computer Vision Community: What is the RSS of Computer Vision? (i.e., a small conference where all the talks are high quality, limited partying involved and you actually get to have meaningful productive research conversations and initialize collaborations)

🎉 Exciting evening ahead! 🌆 I'll be presenting two papers this evening (yes, evening! Because 5-6:45 PM is evening! 🌙). First up is SPOC, a joint first author work, our biggest embodied AI effort from PRIOR @allen_ai. 🤖✨ We showcase the impressive results of training an imitation learning model on shortest path trajectories in simulation! 🚀 Don't miss our poster with videos of the policy 0-shot transfer to the real world doing mobile manipulation! 📹🤯 Poster #156 #CVPR2024 @CVPR

I was supposed to be on vacation enjoying my parents' company, but the @CVPR deadline got extended. At least I'm grateful for having fun colleagues who make this unexpected change of plans (aka one more week of zero-sleep-ten-coffee-a-day) enjoyable!

🚀🎉 Our paper "Harmonic Mobile Manipulation" is accepted to IROS 2024 as an oral presentation! Congrats to @RchalYang and the amazing team! 🎊🤖 This work is especially exciting because: 1. It's end-to-end! Fully learned! No handwritten modules. 🧠 2. It's RGB only! 🌈📸 3. Trained only in simulation and directly transfers to the real world! 🌍🤯 #IROS2024 #Robotics

Try out Molmo on your application! This is a great example by @DJiafei! We have a few videos describing Molmo's different capabilities on our blog! molmo.allenai.org/blog This one is me trying it out on a bunch of tasks and images from RT-X: piped.video/bHOBGAYNBNI

At #CVPR2024, two people stopped by SPOC's poster session and asked if we had tried RL fine-tuning. I told them, "You'll hear about it by the end of summer." They both responded, "That sounds too optimistic! Many have tried RL with IL, but training is too unstable!" I'm happy to say: WE MADE IT STABLE! The results are incredible—unbelievable performance with such a short fine-tuning time using ONLY sparse rewards!

We are back with a new chapter of Embodied AI Lecture Series @ PRIOR @allen_ai! Our first lecture, by @Ken_Goldberg, is happening next week on Friday, Feb 18th at 11 am. Subscribe to our mailing list to receive more information. eepurl.com/hxgpEP

Still working on my slides... yes, I know my talk is in just a few hours 😅✨ One day, I’ll be mature enough to avoid the last-minute rush! But hey, it’s more fun this way! 😄🚀 Excited to share the amazing work my team and I have been doing on cross-embodiment and why I believe focusing on multi-embodiment is so important! 🎉 Looking forward to a fantastic workshop! 🔥

When you're in stealth mode, you can't share what you're working on, even though it’s really interesting. You can’t even talk about an interesting paper you recently read because that’s also signaling! I do miss the openness of academic research, no secrecy!

Do you want to know how we trained end-to-end RGB-Only robots that navigate remarkably efficient in indoor environments without any real-world fine-tuning? Come to our poster @CVPR #137 #CVPR2023! Starting Now! W/ @anikembhavi @LucaWeihs @mattdeitke Rose Hendrix and Ali Farhadi

#CVPR2022 Discussing the "potential negative impacts" of one of our submissions: Me: I really can't think of anything! What could this work possibly negatively impact? Co-author: My mental health! Me [thinking]: Oh, in that case... I have so much to write...!

A Kiana in the wild running a 50k with 8k feet elevation gain in beautiful PNW fall!

Most representation learning works these days focus on contrastive approaches. What if we considered human attention and muscle movements as a supervisory signal? Check out our new large-scale dataset and representation learning approach. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2010.08539.pdf

One of the biggest goals was for more freedom, especially as a woman in a country with extremely sexist lawmakers. Seeing what US lawmakers did on Friday makes me reconsider my decision. This was truly a sad day for America. A new low...

It's difficult to send your daughter to school every day without knowing if she'll make it back home safely or if you'll end up rushing to the hospital because her entire class got poisoned. Unfortunately, this is the reality in Iran right now.

Seattle Rocks! --------------- Seattle First Major US City to Fully Vaccinate 70% of Residents 12+ durkan.seattle.gov/2021/06/s…

Sometimes I wish coding and climbing were a better combination... Coding with scarred fingers after crack climbing is painful! #ClimbingIsNotGoodForYourHealth #GirlsWhoCodeAndClimb

Find yourself a robot that stares at you affectionately, just like mine does! I was cleaning the random snapshots my robot had saved and found this photo! It's cute/creepy that it's staring at me even when I'm not paying attention to it!

The work was done during @RchalYang 's internship @ PRIOR @allen_ai. You know what else we do during our internships after doing cool projects? We go on boat rides :D

🚀 Quick updates! 🚀 1️⃣ SPOC will be showcased at CVPR 2024! 🌟 2️⃣ Our code and data are NOW publicly available! Dive in and explore at github.com/allenai/spoc-robo… 🧠💻

Before every conference deadline, I want to quit research forever and abandon coding, writing papers, making figures. And after EVERY.SINGLE.ONE of them, (Not hours after! Just milliseconds after we submit.) I fall back in love. #ICCV2021 #AdrenalineRush

One of the things I really enjoy is listening to Persian Dance Music while working close to deadlines. It truly boosts my morale! Even if the world's collapsing and nothing's going according to the plan! So if you see me slightly dancing while writing papers, that's why!

Indeed heroes of the year... They just redefined bravery!

Exciting news! Check out our award winning work at our poster session @ #NeurIPS2022 if you're going to NOLA :)

It just makes me sad. Makes me remember my privileges and how it's only out of LUCK that I have what I have today. Makes me think about the classmates who are smarter and more qualified than me and are protesting in Iran and risking their lives right now.

Work life balance is possible in a startup life (but with compromises)! Here’s my schedule from the past ~24 hours: Thursday: 5 AM Wake up 6 AM - 8 AM Climbing 8 AM - 8:15 AM Quick stop at Trader Joe’s for groceries 8:30 AM-7:30 PM Work Work Work 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM Dinner with a friend 8:30 PM - 9:30 PM Laundry + packing for tomorrow’s hike Friday: 4 AM Wake up 5 AM - 8 AM Led a conditioning hike for @MountaineersOrg 9 AM Got to the office (was 5 minutes late, so started the first call of the day in the car) Fun stuff 😃 Right?

Jetting across the continent for a 24-hour adventure to @corl_conf ✈️. In Atlanta on Monday? Let's connect! 🤝 #CoRL2023 P.S. Hiring interns for summer 2024! Curious about what we've been cooking up? 😁🤫🔥🍳 #PunIntended #HiringNow

WOAH! Vy Just solved Wordle of the day!

I am genuinely very excited about this 😄 Vy has officially been promoted to my personal assistant and my productivity tool. Here is how I have been using Vy to be more efficient: 1️⃣ I hate checking email and it is very distracting. I have a workflow that checks my email every half an hour and pings me if there is any email that needs immediate response. 2️⃣ I meet with many people every day! I hate going to meetings not knowing who they are or what we have talked about. I have a workflow that checks all my meetings for the day, researches my meetings, and checks my email for the prior interactions with each person to have more context about the meeting. 3️⃣ As part of my job, I have to research competition and constantly be aware of other companies that are working in similar areas. I keep a spreadsheet with company names and details. Every few days, I ask Vy to do research and add new companies that show up in this space to the spreadsheet. 4️⃣ Every day, I run many tasks at the same time. I can multiply myself! It feels a LOT more efficient 💪 I have personally been using Vy A LOT more with this release! Feel free to message me if you’d like details on any of these items ✨

Wait, WHAT? How did this happen? It has been 1 year already??? Am I just enjoying my time at @allen_ai and that's why I can't feel the time anymore :D? Seriously though, how is that possible?

This is BY FAR the best release we have had so far! BIG game changer! I personally HATE to describe tasks with long texts! It's not 2021! Just watch me and repeat! That should be enough!

Reach for the stars! 🌟 Our 800K-object Objaverse unlocked new horizons. Now, we're aiming higher with Objaverse-XL: the largest known 3D dataset with 10M assets!

CVPR's deadline nights are not fun anymore when everything is virtual! I appreciate pre-covid era even more now! Good old days when we could all work from the same place!

If you’re in the job market right now, this post is for you 🙏 Being in the job market is hard. But hiring is also really hard. Both sides are struggling, and it sometimes feels like the whole system is broken. For one of our roles we got anywhere between 500 and 4000 applicants depending on how long we left it open. And that’s just for an in-person role in Seattle 📍. I honestly can’t imagine how huge the pool is for remote jobs. There’s simply no way any hiring manager can interview everyone. And resumes? They don’t tell you much. Some of the people who look amazing on paper turn out not to be a fit, and some who barely would’ve made it past a resume screen have become some of the best hires we’ve ever made. So what do you do? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with. At @Vercept_ai , we’ve started experimenting. Instead of just collecting resumes, we ask candidates to record a short screen-share walking through work they’re most proud of 💻, and answer a few questions about our product. It’s not a trick or a “gotcha”, it’s just a way to actually see how someone thinks, what excites them, and how they might make an impact. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. People are so much more than a one-page PDF. And honestly, that’s how we’ve been lucky enough to build a team that truly loves what they do 💜, cares deeply about each other, and pours that same care into the product we’re building together 🚀. P.S. Picture is from our Oregon offsite two weeks ago.

Excited to share our work (with @shubhtuls, Saurabh Gupta, Ali Farhadi, and Abhinav Gupta), on predicting the physical forces from RGB videos. The work was done during my internship at FAIR. Don't miss out our talk at CVPR2020 (if it happens😀) PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2003.12045.pdf

It was also a reminder of how HARD it is to be a girl! Equal pay? Heh! We're still dealing with more basic things here! Like whether I am forced to have another human being grow inside me and change my life and career forever!

It felt weird being on the other side of the mentoring table at @WiCVworkshop @cvpr. Joining as a mentee 5 years ago helped me a lot to find myself as a researcher and to become who I am today.

And there's literally nothing I can do about it! How do people cope with the stress of their family's wellbeing these days?

This is by far one of the coolest demos I have ever seen! I personally witnessed some of the video recordings and I can attest it is NOT cherry picked! @SongShuran and her team doing amazing work like always!

😤 Are you tired of writing a planner for every new task? 🔍 Want a free data generation approach with no privileged knowledge? 🌐 That works in Sim AND Real? ✋ No more hand designing planners? ♻️ Error recovery capabilities? We found the Recipe! Generating scalable robot data for "truly" open vocabulary tasks is no longer a dream! From good old "pick up the green cube" to uncapping the jar—"anything" you dream of! Check out our latest work #ManipulateAnything! 🔗 robot-ma.github.io/ #Robotics #AI

NeurIPS is one of my favorite times of the year 💡where I get to see friends, catch up, and nerd out about all things AI 🤓. This year is extra special because we’re (@Vercept_ai) co-hosting a social event with one of my favorite startups out there and with some of my favorite humans! 💫 Can’t wait to team up with @sarahookr, @sudip_r0y, and the amazing crew at Adaption. Registration is now open, link in the thread! 🎟️✨ #neurips2025

🎉 Exciting news! We'll be presenting PoliFormer 🤖 at @corl_conf #CoRL2024. I'll be there in person—come say hi! 👋 Ping me if you're around! 💬✨ P.S. It feels great to have the community receive our work so well with 4 strong accepts for our paper! 🙌🔥

A reminder that I owe it to my people,... OWE it, to be their voice. Even if it's to my small academic network. #MahsaAmini

Our biggest update is coming tomorrow! 😍 Taking Vy to another level!

Lesson of the day: don't make funny faces in the company's photos! Your colleagues might turn them into slack emojis! #ThisIsWhyILoveMyJob #MyColleaguesAreTheBest

#CVPR2020 is over! And yes, there was no "real" networking event, and sure, not many people showed up for Q&As. But this was my most productive CVPR as an attendee. I loved that I could teleport between workshops and/or watch the recorded videos whenever I want.

We are starting the new series of Embodied AI Lecture Series @ PRIOR @allen_ai. Message me if you have any suggestions for the invited speakers or the topics you'd like us to cover.

I gave a talk on one of my research projects last night in an improv comedy show! This was one of the coolest events I've ever been a part of. Super creative comedians do an improv show on the presented works. Thank you for hosting me @BanditScience @CaroDuncombe

Presenting our work at virtual #CVPR2020 (with @shubhtuls, S. Gupta, A. Farhadi, and A. Gupta), on predicting the grasping points and physical forces from videos. Q&A: Tomorrow at 10am and 10pm PST Video: ehsanik.github.io/forcecvpr2… Project page: ehsanik.github.io/forcecvpr2… #cvpr20

Sara's post got me nostalgic! And I can't stop thinking about Pamir! Some beautiful pictures from when I went backpacking with my mom 3 years ago! It was her first backpacking ever and we did not see a single soul! 🥹 It was so peaceful!

Your honor, I rest my case 💅 “Big labs have the advantage!” “Small teams can’t compete!” Filling out a form shouldn’t be this hard! 7 minutes later Gemini’s still “thinking and trying.” Vy’s already finished, stretched, and moved on with its life. 🎤🫳 Thanks to @browserbase for getting Gemini integrated. No AI agents were harmed in preparation of this video (just my patience watching 7 minutes of struggle).

If you are going to @ICCVConference , @LucaWeihs will be there, please reach out if you'd like to learn more about @Vercept_ai. If you are going to @NeurIPSConf, We will both be there, sign up for our event.

F1 process for Iranians: - filling application : ~ 1 hour - trying to book interview slot: 2-3 months (if lucky) - standing in line at embassy: ~ 2 hours - interviewing: < 3 minutes - AP: 3-12 months* (sometimes years...) *Can be rejected with no explanation!

I'm really excited about this feature. Truly a game changer!

Then I open my academic twitter. Someone just published a paper on a new topic. Someone just found a new model for a task. Someone just got their PhD. Someone released a new framework. Nothing wrong with it and I'm happy for/proud of all of them/you. But...

Sim2Real! Sim2Real! Sim2Real! After years of seeing push back against sim2real in my robotics journey, it's awesome to see more and more research proving how cool Sim2Real is! Big shoutout to @xiaolonw for their amazing work showing off Sim2Real in humanoid robotics! 🤖 #sim2real

I sometimes wonder why every photo of me giving a talk or speaking passionately has my hand in the air like I'm doing a dance! 👋 🖐 🙌 Had a great time giving a talk about Vy with @mattdeitke at AI House. Thanks to Audrey Yun for organizing. Other photos are from my talk at Point Nine founders summit a few weeks ago.

🚀 Get ready! This Friday at 4 PM, I’m thrilled to host the panel "CVPR: Past, Present, and Future." 🌟 Got burning questions for our amazing panelists? Drop them below or fill out this form: forms.gle/tPueDZvse3HN88uBA! 👇💡✨ #CVPR2024 @CVPR

Her crime? Not completely wearing her hair with Hijab. Read the last sentence again. It’s not “not wearing her hair”, it’s “not completely wearing her hair”. It’s not “was forced to pay a fine”, it’s “was murdered”.

Instead of scrolling twitter up and down, searching for papers on @SemanticScholar or Google, or searching for most discussed papers, for this CVPR #CVPR2021, I'm trying CVPR Buzz mattdeitke.com/cvpr-buzz/ by Matt Deitke. And I LOVE IT!

Can't wait to share what we have been up to with everyone! Exciting news next week! 😍

My colleague (@Mitchnw) and I made an astonishing scientific discovery a year ago but we never published it. I guess it's time to share it with the community. This phenomenon happens every year from November 8th-15th.

Now I'm totally tempted to do another Ph.D.! Ana is gonna be the best advisor one can wish for. And not just in doing amazing research but also being a fabulous cool energetic kind 😎 human being! Can't wait to explore Utah's ⛷️🧗‍♀️🗻🏔️ with you :)