Motion World Models for Robot Control: A Fireside Chat with Michael Ryoo, Angjoo Kanazawa, Jeannette Bohg, and Kanu Gulati
Join us for a fireside chat with Michael Ryoo, Angjoo Kanazawa, Jeannette Bohg, hosted by Tristan Tao and moderated by Kanu Gulati.
About the speakers:
Michael Ryoo is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University and a Principal Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research. He is a General Chair for CoRL 2025 and was a co-author of the RT-1, RT-2, and SARA-RT papers during his time as a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.
Angjoo Kanazawa is an Assistant Professor in EECS at UC Berkeley and an Amazon Scholar in the Frontier AI & Robotics team. She is best known for her work on 3D human reconstruction, neural radiance fields (NeRFs), and visual understanding of humans in the wild.
Jeannette Bohg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she directs the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning (IPRL) Lab. She is widely recognized for her work in robot manipulation, multimodal perception, and learning-based grasping.
Kanu Gulati is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where she invests in AI infrastructure, enterprise applications, robotics, and autonomous systems. She has led investments in companies such as PolyAI, Waabi, FieldAI, and Nomagic. Kanu holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Texas A&M and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Tristan Tao is a Partner at Rora. He was most recently the CEO and co-founder of HyperArc (acquired by Zendesk in 2025). Previously, he was an executive at Iterable and a YC S15 founder. He holds Computer Science and Statistics degrees from UC Berkeley.
About the fireside chat:
Michael will be sharing an early preview of his latest research on Motion World Models for the first time and discuss this work and robotics industry trends with Angjoo and Jeannette. Kanu will help moderate the discussion.
Hear why Michael believes this paradigm is superior to conventional World Model approaches and everyone's insights about where they believe the robotics industry is heading.
About our sponsor:
Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm known for backing technically ambitious founders tackling consequential problems across AI, robotics, climate, healthcare, and enterprise infrastructure. The firm takes a conviction-driven approach, often investing at inception and partnering closely on company formation, product direction, and go-to-market.
Khosla Ventures was the first institutional backer of OpenAI and has supported category-defining companies such as DoorDash, Square, Stripe, Instacart, and Impossible Foods. Their track record reflects a willingness to fund bold ideas early and provide long-term support to teams building technologies that reshape industries.