Anniversary - 10 years at UCSD

On August 8th, 2026 my current and former UCSD graduate students organized a surprise celebration of my ten years at UC San Diego. This is a short reflection on a decade in San Diego.

It has been an interesting period. We launched the Contextual Robotics Institute, which today engages 40+ faculty, 130+ Ph.D. students, and hundreds of M.Sc. students. The student engagement is broad and very solid. These days where robotics, AI, Embodied AI, and Physical AI are keywords for AI/ML growth. The evolution is solid and the exponential curve has no end in sight. This is very exciting.

We have tried to launch robotics degrees as we had at Georgia Tech. However, department politics and financial conditions, has not been a good conduit for new degree programs. However, ECE’s biggest specialization is robotics and CSE has by now 150+ graduate student in the MS specialization. MAE has defined a mechatronics degree, that also has many robotics students. Overall growth has been impressive. Typically courses in robotics are 100% oversubscribed.

The institute is doing well even if some of our core AI/ML researchers recently have departed for opportunities in industry, which is unavoidable when the field is seeing so much growth.

On the personal research side I have mainly been responsible for two research labs - Cognitive Robotics Laboratory and Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory. CogRob has developed major new techniques for domestic robotics and multi-robot systems. It was also partly the basis for the work on Open X-Embodiment, which formed the basis for Physical Intelligence, SUDO, and Trusted Robot Intelligence (now part of META). In AVL we have designed micro-mobolity services for mail delivery on campus and transitioned technologies (and people) to Bosch, Nissan, Amazon, Waymo, Qualcomm, … Overall the two research groups have generated more than 130 publications or more than one per month, which has been very rewarding. The most rewarding is of course the graduates that have moved to great jobs at a variety of companies, where they are impacting the world.

San Diego has daily ~20C/72F temperatures and 250+ days of sunshine, and the quality of life is great (but not cheap).