Chelsea Finn

Chelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and co-founder of Pi. Her research focuses on enabling robots to learn intelligent behavior through interaction and learning, bridging machine learning and robotic control. She is affiliated with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and the ML Group. Finn holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Education:

• Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• Ph.D. in Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Research Interests: Her work emphasizes end-to-end learning for visual perception and robotic manipulation, reinforcement learning, meta-learning, and scalable robotic learning. She explores how robots can autonomously collect data to develop general skills and adapt to new tasks rapidly.

Key Contributions: Pioneered methods like Aloha for low-cost robotic teleoperation, OpenVLA for open-source vision-language-action models, and frameworks for surgical robotics (SRT-H). Her work has been recognized through awards like the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the MIT TR35.

Awards:

• ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
• Intel Rising Star Faculty Award
• Microsoft Faculty Fellowship
• Presidential Early Career Award
• MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35

Teaching and Outreach: Taught courses such as CS224R (Deep Reinforcement Learning) and CS330 (Deep Multi-Task and Meta Learning at Stanford. Active in promoting diversity in AI through outreach programs for underrepresented students and mentoring initiatives.

Labs and Teams: Leads the IRIS Lab, which studies intelligence through robotic interaction at scale. Collaborates with industry (e.g., Google Brain) and academic institutions to advance AI and robotics research.