David Watkins - Research Lead

I’m a Research Lead at the RAI Institute (formerly Boston Dynamics AI Institute), where I build foundation models and large-scale data infrastructure for learning. I joined as the 20th employee and helped grow the organization to over 275 people.

Foundation Models & Large-Scale Training

• Built foundation models research capability from scratch; pitched, launched, and led a team of 10+ researchers
• Designed and trained video prediction models using internet-scale video data on a 320 H100 GPU cluster (early 2023)
• Created Theia, a vision foundation model that distills multiple pretrained models into a single compact representation (CoRL 2024)
• Built multimodal architectures combining diverse sensor modalities with internet-scale pretrained priors for improved downstream performance

Data Infrastructure & Quality at Scale

• Founded and lead the Capture team (30 people), the largest data collection effort at the institute with a roadmap for 100,000+ demonstrations
• Built handheld force-based data collection capturing force, vision, and proprioception for in-the-wild demonstrations
• Created task definition frameworks and benchmark protocols that improved demonstration quality and consistency across teams
• Established research partnerships with Google, Columbia, ETH Zurich, and Agile Robots for data and evaluation

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

• Won 1st place at the MineRL BASALT Competition (NeurIPS 2021) for learning from human feedback, combining imitation learning, human preference data, and hierarchical knowledge engineering to solve tasks defined only by natural language descriptions
• Developed DIP-RL, a preference-based RL algorithm that leverages demonstrations to infer reward functions from human preferences (ICML 2023)
• Developed gradient-free RL enabling online learning with non-differentiable semantic reward functions (U.S. Patent pending, May 2025)

Publications & Writing

• Published at CoRL 2024, IJCAI 2024, ICML 2023, IROS 2022 (Best Paper Finalist), and more
• Authored a survey on language grounding examining the spectrum from symbolic representations to end-to-end learned embeddings (IJCAI 2024)
• Co-authoring “Elephants Don’t Write Sonnets” with Stefanie Tellex (MIT Press 2026) on the Grounded Turing Test for embodied AI
• Write about AI at whattotelltherobot.com
• Co-organized the New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS) 2025 at MIT

Education & Background

• Ph.D., M.S., B.S. from Columbia University, Columbia Robotics Lab under Prof. Peter Allen
• Dissertation on mobile manipulation without runtime localization (IROS 2022 Best Paper Finalist)
• Army Research Lab Fellow (2018–2022)
• CEO/Co-founder of Odefi (Columbia-IBM Blockchain Accelerator)

More information is available in my curriculum vitae or my resume.