​About the event:

​Robotics is moving faster than most people realise, yet the questions that matter rarely surface in public. What problems are the best teams actually pouring resources into? What directions were tried, then quietly abandoned? And why are frontier companies converging on certain capabilities and not others?

​This session brings together two people who not only sit at the centre of that evolution today, but have lived through the shifts that brought the field to its current inflection point. They’ve seen ideas rise, stall, and return in new forms. That perspective changes how they talk about where we are and what’s coming.

​Rather than a high-level overview, this will be a grounded conversation about how the field is evolving inside labs and companies, why certain bets matter, and what becomes possible if they succeed.

​We’ll keep it practical, honest, and story driven so you walk away with a clear sense of how the next decade in robotics is likely to unfold.

​About Jarad Cannon (CTO, Humanoid):

​Jarad has spent more than a decade building robots that actually ship. At iRobot, he worked across telepresence, defense systems, and the mapping and behaviour engines behind Roomba. At Brain Corp, he helped grow the team from a few dozen people to hundreds, and scaled the company from early prototypes to more than forty thousand robots deployed across commercial environments.

​Now at Humanoid, he’s leading the push to turn next-generation manipulation and humanoid systems into reliable, scalable products. His perspective comes from having lived the full arc of robotics development: research ideas, hard engineering constraints, and the realities of getting machines to operate in industry at scale.

​About Stephen James (Founder & CEO, Neuracore):

​Stephen works at the point where learning theory meets real robots. He leads Neuracore, a cloud native data and training platform built to remove one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern robotics: scalable and reliable infrastructure for robot learning. Before starting Neuracore, he ran the Dyson Robot Learning Lab and built one of the strongest robot learning teams in the world.

​He is also an Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, where he leads the Safe Whole-body Intelligent Robotics Lab. His research spans online and offline reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and methods that let robots use their full physical embodiment safely and efficiently. Earlier in his career, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley with Pieter Abbeel, following his PhD at Imperial under Andrew Davison.

​Stephen has seen both sides of the field. He has worked on cutting-edge research in academia and also watched industry teams struggle to scale those methods into production. His perspective comes from operating directly at that junction.

​Showcases

​We may open a short segment for builders in the room to showcase what they’re working on, whether it’s a project, a startup, or ongoing research. Instead of long pitch decks, we’re encouraging a single clear infographic or diagram that captures the essence of the idea. It’s surprising that this format isn’t already the norm.

​If we confirm this segment, we’ll share details before the event.

​Doors open at 6pm.

​Please arrive by 6.30pm. The Q&A begins at 6.30pm and we won’t be able to let people in after it starts.

​Food and drinks will be available.

​We expect the event to be heavily oversubscribed, so please register to secure a spot. Looking forward to seeing you there.

​Hosted by 50Y UK. Fifty Year’s runs the company-creation programme 5050 (https://www.fiftyyears.com/5050).

Powered by ARIA (https://www.aria.org.uk).

Learn more about ARIA’s £57M robotic dexterity programme here (https://www.aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/smarter-robot-bodies/robot-dexterity/).