David J. Watkins

David J. Watkins

Head of Research @ Tutor Intelligence | Foundation models and robot manipulation at scale | Advisor @ Tola Capital | Built teams of 40 | Ph.D. Columbia

Publications

Koala Gripper: Co-designing Robotic Grippers and Data-Capture Devices for Scaling Dexterous Manipulation Learning

Under review at IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026

Recommended citation: Hajj-Ahmad, A., Guha, Z. K., Fofonoff, T., Teoh, Z. E., O'Neill, C. T., Thacher, B., Fala, I., Surendran, V., Wonsick, M., Whitney, P., & Watkins, D. (2026). Koala Gripper: Co-designing Robotic Grippers and Data-Capture Devices for Scaling Dexterous Manipulation Learning. arXiv:2608.20546. Under review at IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO). paper

Maintaining Demonstration Quality in a 100-Robot Teleoperation Pipeline

Published in RSS 2026 Workshop: It's the Demos, 2026

Recommended citation: Kapoor, K., Khan, S., McCalmon, J., Michel, J., Mohammed, A., Nikiforova, K., Oppenheimer, A., Szabo, V., & Watkins, D. (2026). Maintaining Demonstration Quality in a 100-Robot Teleoperation Pipeline. Workshop on "It's the Demos: A Deep Look at the Role of Demonstration Quality in Imitation-Based Robot Manipulation" at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Sydney, Australia. paper

DIP-RL: Demonstration-Inferred Preference Learning in Minecraft

Published in ICML 2023 Workshop on The Many Facets of Preference-Based Learning, 2023

Recommended citation: Novoseller, E., Goecks, V. G., Watkins, D., Miller, J., & Waytowich, N. R. (2023). DIP-RL: Demonstration-Inferred Preference Learning in Minecraft. In ICML 2023 Workshop on The Many Facets of Preference-Based Learning. paper

Efficient Graph Field Integrators Meet Point Clouds

Published in International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023), 2023

Recommended citation: Choromanski, K., Sehanobish, A., Lin, H., Zhao, Y., Berger, E., Parshakova, T., Pan, A., Watkins, D., Zhang, T., Likhosherstov, V., Basu Roy Chowdhury, S., Dubey, K. A., Jain, D., Sarlos, T., Chaturvedi, S., & Weller, A. (2023, July). Efficient graph field integrators meet point clouds. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 5978-6004). PMLR. paper

Towards Solving Fuzzy Tasks with Human Feedback: A Retrospective of the MineRL BASALT 2022 Competition

Published in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR), 2023

Recommended citation: Milani, S., Kanervisto, A., Ramanauskas, K., Schulhoff, S., Houghton, B., Mohanty, S., Galbraith, B., Chen, K., Song, Y., Zhou, T., Yu, B., Liu, H., Guan, K., Hu, Y., Lv, T., Malato, F., Leopold, F., Raut, A., Hautamäki, V., Melnik, A., Ishida, S., Henriques, J. F., Klassert, R., Laurito, W., Novoseller, E., Goecks, V. G., Waytowich, N., Watkins, D., Miller, J., & Shah, R. (2022). Towards Solving Fuzzy Tasks with Human Feedback: A Retrospective of the MineRL BASALT 2022 Competition. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 220, 171-188. paper

Mobile Manipulation Leveraging Multiple Views

Published in IROS 2022, 2022

Recommended citation: Watkins-Valls, D., Maia H., Varley J., Seshadri M., Sanabria J., Waytowich, N., \& Allen, P. (2022). Mobile Manipulation Leveraging Multiple Views. 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022 paper

Multiple View Performers for Shape Completion

Published in arXiv, 2022

Recommended citation: Watkins, D., Allen, P., Choromanski, K., Varley, J., & Waytowich, N. (2022). Multiple View Performers for Shape Completion. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.06291. paper

Learning Mobile Manipulation

Published in PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 2022

Recommended citation: Watkins, D. (2022). Learning Mobile Manipulation. PhD Thesis, Columbia University. arXiv:2206.03448. paper

Retrospective on the 2021 MineRL BASALT Competition on Learning from Human Feedback

Published in NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track (PMLR), 2022

Recommended citation: Shah, R., Wang, S. H., Wild, C., Milani, S., Kanervisto, A., Goecks, V. G., Waytowich, N., Watkins-Valls, D., Prakash, B., Mills, E., Garg, D., Fries, A., Souly, A., Chan, J. S., del Castillo, D., & Lieberum, T. (2022). Retrospective on the 2021 MineRL BASALT Competition on Learning from Human Feedback. Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track, PMLR 176:259-272. paper

Accelerated Robot Learning via Human Brain Signals

Published in ICRA, 2020

Recommended citation: I. Akinola et al., "Accelerated Robot Learning via Human Brain Signals," 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020, pp. 3799-3805, doi: 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9196566. paper

Multi-Modal Geometric Learning for Grasping and Manipulation

Published in ICRA, 2019

Recommended citation: D. Watkins-Valls, J. Varley and P. Allen, "Multi-Modal Geometric Learning for Grasping and Manipulation," 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019, pp. 7339-7345, doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794233. paper

Human Robot Interface for Assistive Grasping (Poster)

Published in NEMS, 2017

Recommended citation: David Watkins-Valls, Chaiwen Chou, Caroline Weinberg, Jacob Varley, Lynne Weber, Adam Blanchard, Peter Allen, Joel Stein "Human Robot Interface for Assistive Grasping (Poster)". In: New England Manipulation Symposium (2017). paper

Human Robot Interface for Assistive Grasping

Published in arXiv, 2017

Recommended citation: David Watkins-Valls, Chaiwen Chou, Caroline Weinberg, Jacob Varley, Kenneth Lyons, Sanjay Joshi, Lynne Weber, Joel Stein, and Peter Allen. "Human Robot Interface for Assistive Grasping." arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.02462 (2018). paper