MIT Robotics Seminar: Greg Stein

Greg Stein wants to bring about a future in which robots act more intelligently in a dynamic and uncertain world and engender trust in the humans with whom they share it. Even as robots have started to populate our world, they are limited in the types of things they can do and struggle to accomplish even simple tasks in places that they've never been before. Stein's research is devoted to changing how robots think about uncertainty so that they can make predictions about their surroundings from experience and understand the role their actions play in shaping their environment. His work so far—nominated for best paper and awarded best oral presentation at the 2018 Conference on Robot Learning—has predominantly focused on effective navigation in previously unseen buildings, and he is working on expanding his research to improve home-care robotics and self-driving vehicles. His ongoing work is devoted to imbuing autonomous agents with the ability to better explain their decision-making when faced with uncertainty, a critical capability if robots are to realize their full potential and safely operate alongside people.

Stein believes that effective communication and mentorship are critical components of a successful research lab. As a graduate student, he was an active member of the community, and his work as a volunteer communication advisor and as a wellness coach helped him to become an effective communicator and to cope with the challenges of graduate school, experiences he works to pass along to his students.

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The MIT Robotics Seminars have returned this Spring! Juraj Kabzan from Skydio kicked us off a few weeks ago. Additionally, we have an outstanding lineup of speakers planned for the rest of the semester, and we invite all of you to attend the seminars and meet the speakers and colleagues:

• Friday, March 6, 2026 — Greg Stein (George Mason University)
• Friday, March 13, 2026 — Oussama Khatib (Stanford University)
• Friday, April 3, 2026 — Mac Schwager (Stanford University)
• Friday, April 10, 2026 — Melanie Zeilinger (ETH Zurich)
• Friday, April 24, 2026 — Seth Hutchinson (Northeastern University)
• Friday, May 1, 2026 — Giuseppe Loianno (UC Berkeley)
• Friday, May 8, 2026 — Sanjiban Choudhury (Cornell University)

When & Where:

All seminars will be held on Fridays, 3-4 pm, in 45-230. A social event will follow the seminars at 4 pm!

Format:

All seminars will be in person. We will not live-stream the events, but we will record the talks as usual and release them on the MIT Robotics YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MITRoboticsSeminar/videos

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GWiRC:

Some of the Friday lunches with the speakers will be held in conjunction with the Graduate Women in Robotics Community (GWiRC), an awesome association that organizes a variety of events at MIT and beyond.

You can learn more and subscribe to their mailing list here: https://robotics.mit.edu/graduate-women-robotics-community

Sponsors:

A big shoutout to our sponsors, who are making this semester’s robotics seminars possible! We are pleased to have three amazing sponsors supporting the MIT Robotics Seminars this semester: Skydio, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation (and more!) for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots (just a few miles from MIT!). Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots.

Admins:

A big THANK YOU to our amazing Robotics Seminars admin, Vendi Pavic, who is handling the logistics of the seminars and making sure they run smoothly.

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