Our Approach
A gymnastics coach does not teach by commanding joint angles. Similarly, embodied intelligence requires understanding the fundamental principles of physical learning rather than exhaustive programming of specific motions.
Research at EMBER follows a principled direction, prioritizing methods that develop deep understanding over demonstrations that fail to scale. We are particularly interested in studying the sim-to-real gap as a robustness metric when we deploy our models zero-shot on hardware.
EMBER Seminars
Apr 29, 2026 recording
Cathy Wu (MIT): Tackling the Long Tail of Transportation Optimization with Machine Learning
Apr 22, 2026 recording
Mac Schwager (Stanford): How General are Generalist Robot Policies?
Apr 20, 2026 recording
Leslie Kaelbling (MIT): Rational Robots
Apr 15, 2026 recording
Jaime Fernández Fisac (Princeton): Scaling Safety-Critical Control Without Surrendering Guarantees
Apr 01, 2026 recording
Allison Okamura (Stanford): When Robots Care: Assistive Medical Robotics from Hospital to Home
Mar 18, 2026 recording
David Hyunchul Shim (KAIST): From Drones to Cars to Generalist Approaches
Mar 11, 2026 recording
Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley): Causal Learning as Empowerment Gain
Feb 18, 2026 recording
Carlo Sferrazza (Amazon FAR): Humanoid Robot Learning
Feb 11, 2026 recording
Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley): Robot Foundation Models
Feb 04, 2026 recording
Rodney Brooks (MIT): Designing Embodied Intelligences with Which People Will Willingly Cohabit
Jan 28, 2026 recording
Zen Luo (NVIDIA): Building Humanoid Behavior Foundation Models
Nov 19, 2025 recording
Madhur Behl (UVA): Bringing AI Up to Speed
Nov 05, 2025 recording
Pannag Sanketi (Google DeepMind): Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis - The Journey
Oct 29, 2025 recording
Maani Ghaffari (UMich): Computational Symmetry and Learning for Robotics
Oct 15, 2025 recording
John Bicket (Samsara): Making a Real World Impact
Oct 08, 2025 recording
Haozhi Qi (UC Berkeley): The Atomic Skill Approach for Robot Dexterity
Oct 01, 2025 recording
Giuseppe Loianno (UC Berkeley): Learning Robot Super Autonomy
Sep 17, 2025 recording
Soon-Jo Chung (Caltech): Learning and Decision Making for Agile Robots Under Failure
Sep 10, 2025 recording