Lerrel Pinto Receives NSF CAREER Award

June 6, 2024

Lerrel Pinto, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, has received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation to develop his project "Synesthetic Teaching of Dexterous Robots through Multi-Sensory Fusion of Vision, Touch, and Vibration."

The project "aims to develop Synesthetic Teaching, a new framework for teaching dexterous manipulation to multifingered robots using rich, multi-modal sensory observations." Professor Pinto and his team "will create robots that solve more difficult manipulation problems than currently possible, by developing new algorithms in self-supervised representation learning, cross-modal fusion, and online imitation. The intended applications of these robots are in assistive robotics, flexible manufacturing, household robotics, fulfillment and others that require enhanced multi-fingered dexterity."  

CAREER awards are the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty and are designed to help provide a foundation for a lifetime of scientific leadership. The awards are given to outstanding scientists who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research, education, and the integration of education and research.

Professor Pinto also recently received a 2024 IEEE RAS Award in the Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation category "for pioneering contributions in self-supervised robot learning.”