WORLDS: World Models and Spatial Intelligence for Physical AI

Ken Goldberg is President of the Robot Learning Foundation (organizer of the annual Conference on Robot Learning) and William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair of Engineering at UC Berkeley and Chief Scientist of Ambi Robotics and Jacobi Robotics. Ken leads research in robotics and automation: grasping, manipulation, and learning for applications in warehouses, industry, homes, agriculture, and robot-assisted surgery.

He is Professor of IEOR with appointments in EECS and Art Practice. Ken is Chair of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Steering Committee (60 faculty) and is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). He has published ten US patents, over 400 refereed papers, and presented over 600 invited lectures to academic and corporate audiences.

Tetsuya Ogata received the B.S., M.S., and D.E. degrees in mechanical engineering from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 1993, 1995, and 2000, respectively. He was a Research Associate with Waseda University from 1999 to 2001, a Research Scientist with the RIKEN Brain Science Institute from 2001 to 2003, and an Associate Professor at Kyoto University from 2003 to 2012. Since 2012, he has been a Professor with the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Waseda University.

Since 2017, he has been a Joint-appointed Fellow with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and a visiting professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII). He served as director of the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) and the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). He has been the director of the Institute of AI and Robotics at Waseda University since 2020, the chairperson of the AI Robot Association (AIRoA), and the Research supervisor of JST CREST "Fundamentals and Core Technologies for Embodied AI" since 2025. His current research interests include cognitive developmental robotics, the VLA (Vision Language Action) model, and human-robot interaction. IEEE Fellow since 2026.

Katerina Fragkiadaki is the JPMorgan Chase Associate Professor in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at UC Berkeley and Google Research. Her research focuses on enabling few-shot and continual learning for perception, action, and language grounding. Her work has been recognized by the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR and DARPA Young Investigator Awards, as well as faculty research awards from Google, Toyota Research Institute, Amazon, NVIDIA, UPMC, and Sony. She served as a Program Chair for ICLR 2024.

Koichiro Niinuma, Ph.D., is a Research Director at Fujitsu Research of America in Pittsburgh, USA. He earned his M.S. from Kyoto University and his Ph.D. from the University of Tsukuba, and he was a visiting scholar at Michigan State University from 2009 to 2010. His research focuses on multimodal AI for real-world environments, including human behavior modeling, multimodal perception, biometrics, and 3D vision. Dr. Niinuma has contributed to over 50 U.S. and international patents, and his innovations—including technologies for fingerprint recognition and continuous authentication—have been widely adopted in commercial products.

László A. Jeni is an Assistant Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the CUBE Lab. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision and behavioral science, focusing on modeling, understanding, and synthesizing human motion and behavior through advanced sensor technologies. He earned his master's degree in Computer Science from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2012. Dr. Jeni has been recognized with several Best Paper awards, including honors at IEEE HSI 2011 and IEEE FG 2015. He has received Outstanding Reviewer awards at NeurIPS 2019, CVPR 2017, and IEEE FG 2015. With over 80 peer-reviewed publications, his work has been supported by the NIH, NSF, DoD, DARPA, as well as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Fujitsu.

Mihoko Niitsuma is a professor in the Department of Precision Mechanics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, at Chuo University, Japan. She received her B.E. and M.E. degrees from Tokyo University of Technology and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2007. She previously worked as a visiting researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and as a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University (2016-2017).

She currently serves as an AdCom member of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society and as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. Her work in human-robot interaction and intelligent environments has been recognized with multiple awards, including the IEEE RAS Japan Chapter Young Award (2007) and the JSME Young Engineers Award (2013). She also serves as a Keynote speaker for the Women's Forum & WiE Panel Lunch at IROS 2025.

Makoto Kawano is a Project Assistant Professor at the Matsuo Laboratory, The University of Tokyo, and a Lecturer at ZEN University. His research spans transfer learning, deep generative models, and foundation models, with a particular focus on robotics and autonomous driving. He received his bachelor's degree from Keio University in 2014, his master's degree from The University of Tokyo in 2016, and his Ph.D. from Keio University in 2019, during which he was a JSPS Research Fellow (DC1). He joined the Matsuo Laboratory in 2019 as a Project Researcher and became a Project Assistant Professor in 2022.

Ananya Bal is a PhD student in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Her research interests include hand-object interaction, multimodal foundation models, and the broader use of machine learning and computer vision in robotics. She previously worked on implicit neural representations for medical ultrasound, with applications in segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and soft-tissue deformation modeling. Before CMU, she earned her undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Vellore Institute of Technology and also interned at Fidelity Investments.

Jeff Ichnowski is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. He was a postdoc at UC Berkeley's Sky Computing/RISE lab, AUTOLAB, and BAIR. Before returning to academia, he was the principal architect at SuccessFactors, Inc., one of the world's largest cloud-based SaaS companies. He is a co-founder of Jacobi Robotics, Inc. His lab, the Momentum Robotics Lab, explores robot algorithms and systems for high-speed motion, task, and manipulation planning, using cloud-based high-performance computing, optimization, and deep learning.

Shaunak A. Mehta, Ph.D. is a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Research of America in Pittsburgh, USA. He earned his B. Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology in 2021 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 2024 and 2025 respectively. His research focuses on bridging the gap between world modelling and robot learning for real-world deployment. His previous research focused on human-robot interaction, stable policy learning, assistive robotics, and dexterous manipulation.

Ananya Hazarika is a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Research of America. She completed her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cleveland State University and holds an M.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati. Her research focuses on embodied AI, robot learning, spatial perception, and world models for intelligent robotic systems. She has contributed to advanced research projects through roles at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and T-Mobile, and has also held leadership roles within IEEE organizations.

Prajit Krisshna Kumar, Ph.D. is a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Research of America. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo. His research focuses on active 3D planning, mapping, and reconstruction for autonomous robotic systems. His previous work investigated the concurrent design of robot morphology and behavior in multi-robot systems. He has co-authored more than 10 conference papers and has received two best paper awards.