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Sebastian B Thrun

Adjunct Professor, Computer Science

Contact Info

Web page:

http://robots.stanford.edu

BioI'm a Computer Science PhD student at Stanford in the NLP group and AI lab, supervised by Tatsunori Hashimoto and Christopher Potts. Previously, I was a founding member of the technical staff at Contextual AI (a startup working on retrieval augmented generation). Before that, I was a research engineer at Hugging Face. Before that, I was a research associate at Facebook AI Research, supervised by Douwe Kiela and then Adina Williams. And before that, I was a research associate at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, supervised by Roger Levy. I Received my MEng in computer science with a concentration in artificial intelligence under Patrick Winston at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. I received my BS also at MIT in computer science, with a minor in linguistics and a minor in math. While I was an undergrad, I did research with the Perception Systems Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

I'm interested in AI. Specifically: natural language processing, computer vision, high-dimensional statistics, and data-centric AI methods. I have done several large-scale projects with a focus on the data side, which is so intertwined with the model side that it is sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Here are three of my favorite papers:

Perplexity Correlations: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05816
(This one has some fun math and is useful for pretraining data selection)

Multimodal Evaluation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03162
(This one poses a still open challenge for word-order understanding in vision-language models)

Rover Relocalization for Mars Sample Return: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9381709
(There is nothing cooler than robots in space)

Contact Info
Mail Code: 9025
tthrush@stanford.edu

Jakob Thumm

Postdoctoral Scholar, Aeronautics and Astronautics

BioJakob is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research aims to improve the safety, efficiency, and acceptance of autonomous robots by combining formal methods and machine learning. Jakob focuses on developing algorithms that enable robots to efficiently act in dynamic environments while guaranteeing safety at all times. He is particularly interested in allowing robots to safely work together with humans.

Prior to joining Stanford, Jakob earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Munich. His doctoral thesis is titled ``Establishing Safe and Preference-Aligned Human-Robot Collaboration in Autonomous Manipulation'' and passed with highest distinctions. Jakob received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Mechatronics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, researching the intersection of system modelling and machine learning.

Outside the lab, Jakob is a passionate runner and volunteer at Sutro Stewards, where he maintains hiking trails in the heart of San Francisco.