Detailed CV (pdf) Last Modified on Jan 22th ,2020
Vikash Kumar is an Adjunct Professor at the Robotics Institute, CMU. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of Washington with Prof. Sergey Levine and Prof. Emo Todorov and his M.S. and B.S. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. His professional experience includes roles as Sr. Research Scientist at FAIR-MetaAI, and Research Scientist at Google-Brain and OpenAI.
Vikash’s research centers on understanding the fundamentals of embodied intelligence across biological, digital, and electromechanical systems. His research leverages data-driven techniques to realize artificial beings — both digital and physical — that are indistinguishable from humans in their appearance, spatial reasoning, and behavioral intelligence. His work has led to advancements such as human-level dexterity in anthropomorphic robotic hands as well as physiological digital twins, low-cost scalable systems capable of contact-rich behaviors, skilled multi-task multi-skill robotic agents, and more.
He is the lead creator of MyoSuite and RoboHive, and a founding member of the MuJoCo physics engine, now widely used in the fields of Robotics and Machine Learning. His works have been recognized with the best Master's thesis award, best manipulation paper at ICRA’16, best paper award at ICRA'24, best workshop paper ICRA'22, CIFAR AI chair'20 (declined), and have been widely covered in a wide variety of media outlets such as NewYorkTimes, Reuters, ACM, WIRED, MIT Tech reviews, IEEE Spectrum, etc. (Webpage: http://vikashplus.github.io)
