Byron Boots

Boots received his Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University under the advisory of Geoffrey J. Gordon.^[1][2] He later became an assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.^[3]

He is currently the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington.^[4] He was also a principal research scientist in the Seattle Robotics Lab at NVIDIA Research and co-chair of the Technical Committee on Robot Learning for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.^[5][6]

In 2022, Boots co-founded the technology startup Overland AI to develop off-road autonomous vehicles.^[7] In 2024, the U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) jointly awarded the startup a $18.6 million contract to develop autonomy software for the Army's Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program.^[8]

Boots has received several awards for his work on robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. They include the NSF CAREER award in 2018,^[9] the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Early Career Award in 2020,^[10] and the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2022.^[11]