Roozbeh Mottaghi

Roozbeh Mottaghi is a Senior AI Research Scientist Manager at Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) group and an Affiliate Associate Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His work bridges academic research and industrial AI development, focusing on embodied artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer vision.

Dr. Mottaghi received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA under the supervision of Alan Yuille. He completed his Master's degrees at Simon Fraser University and Georgia Institute of Technology, and earned his Bachelor's degree from Sharif University of Technology. Prior to his current positions, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University and Research Manager of the PRIOR team at the Allen Institute for AI.

Dr. Mottaghi's research focuses on embodied AI, where agents learn to interact with and understand their physical environments. His work spans robotics, computer vision, and human-robot interaction, with particular emphasis on 3D scene understanding, visual reasoning, and language-vision integration. His research addresses fundamental challenges in how AI systems can perceive, navigate, and manipulate the physical world through embodied experiences.

His recent publications demonstrate a strong trend toward increasingly sophisticated embodied AI systems capable of complex multi-agent collaboration, open-vocabulary understanding, and human-like reasoning about physical environments. His work bridges simulation and real-world robotics, with significant contributions to benchmark creation and standardized evaluation frameworks for embodied AI.

Dr. Mottaghi's work has been recognized with several prestigious honors including:

• Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022
• Multiple oral presentations at top-tier conferences (CVPR, ICCV)
• Spotlight presentations at major computer vision conferences

Dr. Mottaghi has mentored numerous students and researchers, including PhD students and Pre-doctoral Young Investigators. His advising style emphasizes both theoretical rigor and practical implementation, preparing students for successful careers in both academia and industry. His work has been supported by significant research funding from Meta and previously from the Allen Institute for AI.

Dr. Mottaghi has been instrumental in developing AI2-THOR, RoboTHOR, and Habitat simulation platforms, which have become standard tools in the embodied AI research community. His leadership in the PRIOR team at AI2 and currently at Meta's FAIR has driven significant advances in how AI systems understand and interact with the physical world.