Our Team

  • Favyen Bastani

    Favyen Bastani

    Applied Research Scientist

    Favyen is an Applied Research Scientist on PRIOR at AI2. Prior to AI2, he was a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by Sam Madden. In addition to tackling challenges with employing computer vision methods in application domains, Favyen is interested in building systems that make it easier for users with little expertise to develop ML pipelines for analyzing their large-scale image and video datasets. Outside of research, he enjoys cycling, hiking, and reading science fiction and fantasy.

  • Kristin Cha

    Kristin Cha

    Executive Assistant

    Kristin is an Executive Assistant for AllenNLP and PRIOR supporting Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Noah Smith, and Ranjay Krishna. Before Ai2, Kristin was at Amazon for 7 years working in recruiting, AWS SageMaker, and Books.

    • Bio
      Kristin's Biography
  • Christopher Clark

    Christopher Clark

    Research Scientist

    Christopher Clark received a PhD from the University of Washington, where he worked with Luke Zettlemoyer. His PhD work was on preventing models from picking up shallow heuristics that work on the training data, but do not generalize to out-of-domain settings. More broadly, he is interested in better understanding how deep learning systems learn and generalize when used for natural language processing or computer vision. Outside of research, he enjoys hiking, skiing and board games.

  • Yuquan Deng

    Yuquan Deng

    Research Engineer

    I am a Research Engineer at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where I work on the PRIOR team. I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. My research interests broadly lie in robotics and computer vision.

  • Abhay Deshpande

    Abhay Deshpande

    Predoctoral Young Investigator

    Abhay is a PYI in PRIOR. He is a full-stack roboticist, whose research is in the area of robotic manipulation, and primarily focuses on learning for robotic control.

  • Ziqi (Roy) Gao

    Ziqi (Roy) Gao

    Predoctoral Young Investigator

    Roy is a PYI in PRIOR. His research is at the intersection of computer vision and robotics, and focuses on data-centric AI and multimodal learning.

  • Tanmay Gupta

    Tanmay Gupta

    Research Scientist

    Tanmay received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he was advised by Prof. Derek Hoiem and closely collaborated with Prof. Alex Schwing. Tanmay's research interests include learning from vision and language, and building general purpose learning systems. Besides research, Tanmay enjoys playing guitar and creating somewhat musical acoustic covers.

  • Winson Han

    Winson Han

    Game Designer

    Having received a Bachelor of Arts in Game Design from the DigiPen Institute of Technology, Winson Han hopes to bring modern Game Design principles to the Computer Vision team. His focus on User Experience, Game Feel, and Game Mechanics Design bridges the gap between immersion in a digital space and the potential of real world applications. Along with Game Design, his interests include piano, digital art, and playing games—MMOs being his favorite.

  • Rose Hendrix

    Rose Hendrix

    Research Engineer

    Rose is a research engineer on PRIOR, formerly of the AST team. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in Mechanical Engineering, where she researched human-robot interaction. Her current research interests center around reinforcement learning and embodied AI. Outside of work, she has too many interests and should probably narrow it down a little.

    • Bio
      Rose's Biography
  • Alvaro Herrasti

    Alvaro Herrasti

    Software Engineer

    Alvaro Herrasti received a B.S. in computer science and engineering at ITESM in Mexico City. After graduating, he worked at Microsoft's Xbox Live Team. Alvaro's interests include machine learning, AI applied to interactive environments, computer vision and natural language hybrid tasks, graphics and game design. He is fond of music; from listening and collecting records, to DJing and production.

    • Bio
      Alvaro's Biography
  • Yejin Kim

    Yejin Kim

    Research Engineer

    Yejin Kim is a Research Engineer on the PRIOR team, holding an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University and a master's degree from Cornell University. Her prior experience encompasses diverse aspects of research and development in robotics, including mechatronics, computer vision, and simulation. Her research interests center on enhancing the capabilities of dexterous mobile robots. In addition, Yejin is a painter and mixed-media artist. She showcased her artwork in generative AI and robotics at various forums.

  • Ranjay Krishna

    Ranjay Krishna

    Research Director

    Ranjay Krishna is the director of PRIOR at AI2 and an Assistant Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision and human computer interaction. This research has received best paper, outstanding paper, and orals at CVPR, ACL, CSCW, NeurIPS, UIST, and ECCV, and been reported by Science, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and PBS NOVA. His research has been supported by Google, Amazon, Cisco, Toyota Research Institute, NSF, ONR, and Yahoo. He holds a bachelors degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering and in Computer Science from Cornell University, a masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

  • Duong Le

    Duong Le

    Research Engineer

    Duong Le is a Research Engineer on the PRIOR team. He graduated from Ho Chi Minh city University of Technology in 2020 with a B.eng in Computer Science. Before joining AI2, he was at VinAI Research and also spent past summers interning at Stanford, NUS, and TUAT. Duong's research interests are in the area of learning from unlabeled data in vision domain.

  • Sangho Lee

    Sangho Lee

    Research Scientist

    Sangho Lee is a Research Scientist at AI2 on the PRIOR team. His research interests include multimodal representation learning, especially for high-level video understanding and reasoning. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University where he was advised by Prof. Gunhee Kim. Beyond research, he enjoys watching baseball or soccer games.

  • Wilbert Pumacay

    Wilbert Pumacay

    Predoctoral Young Investigator

    Wilbert is currently a PYI at PRIOR, working on robotics simulation and mobile manipulation. His primary area of interest is robotics learning and benchmarking.

  • Joe Redmon

    Joe Redmon

    Research Scientist

    I am a research scientist at Ai2 working on machine learning for the environment. I am also the inventor of YOLO.

  • Jordi Salvador

    Jordi Salvador

    Research Engineer

    Jordi received his Ph.D. from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Barcelona) in September 2011 and two M.Sc.'s, in Research on Information Technologies and in Telecommunication Engineering, from the same university in 2008 and 2006. Before joining AI2, he worked for Technicolor R&I and Amazon as a research scientist. His research interests range from multi-view reconstruction and machine learning-based image processing to applications of deep learning with main focus on computer vision. Besides research, he loves cooking, hiking, every piece of art of the Romantic era, science fiction and graphic novels.

  • Peter Sushko

    Peter Sushko

    Predoctoral Young Investigator

    Predoctoral researcher on AI2's PRIOR team, specializing in image/video generation and agentic AI. He holds an M.S. in Statistics from UW (2024) and a B.A. in Mathematics from Santa Clara University.

  • Rohun Tripathi

    Rohun Tripathi

    Research Engineer

    Rohun is a research engineer in PRIOR. Before AI2, he was working at Amazon in video generation and scene understanding. His research interests are in generative computer vision, scene understanding and 3D vision. He attended school at Cornell Tech and IIT Kanpur. When he is not working, he enjoys basketball, snowboarding, reading and petting dogs on the street.

  • Eli VanderBilt

    Eli VanderBilt

    Digital Artist

    Eli VanderBilt graduated from the University of Idaho in 2012, with a Bachelor of Science in 3D Art and Animation. Since then, he has worked as an artist in the fields of gaming, virtual reality, and architecture, with an emphasis on visual storytelling through player interaction. His hobbies include traveling, film study, fantasy/sci-fi literature, and arts & crafts.

    • Bio
      Eli's Biography

  • Piper Wolters

    Piper Wolters

    Research Engineer

    Piper received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Western Washington University in 2019 and 2021, where her research focused on few-shot learning for audio classification and event detection, as well as climate data emulation using generative adversarial networks. Piper's current research interests revolve around employing computer vision methods to various application domains. In her free time, she enjoys mountain biking, climbing, skiing, backpacking, and traveling.

2025 Interns

  • Jitesh Jain

    Jitesh Jain

    Georgia Institute of Technology

    Jitesh is a Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests revolve around developing multimodal systems. His previous works are based on analyzing and improving the visual perception ability in Multimodal Large Language Models, building upon his experience from working on developing models for dense prediction tasks.

  • Snehal Jauhri

    Snehal Jauhri

    TU Darmstadt

    Snehal is a PhD candidate at the PEARL group at TU Darmstadt, Germany. His research is focused on machine learning & computer vision for robotic perception and mobile manipulation, supervised by Georgia Chalvatzaki. At PRIOR, he is working on whole-body robot learning for mobile manipulation with Rose Hendrix!

  • Harris Zhang

    Harris Zhang

    University of Wisconsin-Madison

    Harris is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interest is in developing generalist large multimodal models that excels in large variety of tasks. His previous works focused on improving spatial and temporal reasoning in VLMs, and his recent interest is on token pruning/compression.

  • Boyuan Zheng

    Boyuan Zheng

    Ohio State University

    Boyuan Zheng is a Research Intern on the PRIOR team. He is a Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University, advised by Prof. Yu Su. He received his M.S. degree from Johns Hopkins University and his B.S. degree from Northeastern University. His research focuses on building autonomous agents that use language as a vehicle for reasoning and communication. Outside of work, Boyuan enjoys hiking, traveling, and exploring delicious food.

  • Chenhao Zheng

    Chenhao Zheng

    University of Washington

    Chenhao is a student researcher at AI2. He is a first year PhD student at the University of Washington, advised by Prof. Ranjay Krishna.

  • Zixian Ma

    Zixian Ma

    University of Washington

    Research Intern at AI2, 2nd year PhD at UW

  • Tanush Yadav

    Tanush Yadav

    University of Washington

    Tanush is a research intern on the PRIOR team interested in video understanding. He is also a rising senior at the University of Washington, where he studies computer science and mathematics. Outside of work, he enjoys running and hiking.

  • Jiafei Duan

    Jiafei Duan

    University of Washington

    Jiafei Duan is a third year Ph.D. student at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, advised by Professors Dieter Fox and Ranjay Krishna. His research focuses on robot data generation and scaling multimodal large language models for robotics. His work is supported by A*STAR National Science PhD Fellowship.

  • Jieyu Zhang

    Jieyu Zhang

    University of Washington

    I’m a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Washington, Seattle

  • George Stoica

    George Stoica

    Georgia Institute of Technology

    I am a fourth-year Machine Learning PhD Student in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology co-advised by Professors Judy Hoffman (Georgia Tech) and Ranjay Krishna (UW).

Student Collaborators

  • Reza Salehi

    Reza Salehi

    University of Washington

    I am a fourth year PhD student in computer science at the The University of Washington, where I work with Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Ali Farhadi. My research spans pretraining, post-training, and benchmarking multi-modal large language models, specifically video language models. Prior to UW, I received my B.Sc. in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology. I publish under my full name Mohammadreza, and go by Reza among my friends.

  • James Park

    James Park

    University of Washington

    Jae Sung is a PhD student at University of Washington and student researcher at AI2. His main interests are visual perception and language understanding for reasoning about the visual world, with a focus on visual commonsense reasoning, multimodal grounding, and evaluation of vision-language models.

  • Diego Llanes

    Diego Llanes

    Western Washington University

    Diego received his B.S in computer science in 2024, and will be receiving his Masters in 2025. His research in his undergrad and masters was focused on applications of machine learning for hyperspectral imagery and remote sensing. In their free time they run, bike, hike, climb, ski, and play bike polo.

  • Ainaz Eftkhar

    Ainaz Eftkhar

    University of Washington

    I am a PhD student at the University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering supervised by Prof. Ali Farhadi and Prof. Ranjay Krishna (RAIVN Lab). I'm also a graduate student researcher with PRIOR team at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). In the summers of 2023 and 2024, I was a research intern with at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), where I worked closely with Kuo-Hao Zeng and Kiana Ehsani. Previously, I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. During the final year of my bachelor's program, I was a visiting student at EPFL where I worked in VILAB under the supervision of Prof. Amir Zamir. My research interests lie in the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, embodied-AI, and Robotics.

  • Haoquan Fang

    Haoquan Fang

    University of Washington

    Haoquan is an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, pursuing a double major in computer science (with honors) and statistics, with a minor in mathematics. He is also a research collaborator working with the PRIOR team at the Allen Institute for AI. His research mainly focuses on robot learning, foundation models for robotics, and policy training.

  • Jason Lee

    Jason Lee

    University of Washington

    Jason is a student researcher at the Allen Institute for AI with the PRIOR team and a master's student at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on robot learning and building internet scale robotics foundation models that can generalize to the real world.

Previous Interns

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014