Tang Family Foundation gives $500,000 for embodied AI scholarships at Waterloo
Eight inaugural graduate recipients each received $15,000, and one PhD candidate is working on exoskeletons for people with mobility impairment.
A $500,000 investment from the Tang Family Foundation, a charitable fund under the Philantra Foundation, will pay for graduate scholarships in embodied AI at Waterloo’s Data and Artificial Intelligence Institute (Waterloo.AI). The first eight recipients, from Engineering and Math, each received $15,000.
Waterloo.AI director Stephen Smith describes embodied intelligence as AI that senses and acts in real environments. A robot clearing a kitchen, he explains, can use a large language model to infer that a mug is fragile and belongs in a cupboard, reasoning that once had to be coded by hand for every object and room.
PhD candidate Atusa Ghorbani Siavashani, co-supervised by John McPhee and Arash Arami, is working on exoskeletons, wearable robots that could help people living with mobility impairment. The scholarship, the student says, shows that industry as well as academia cares about the work.
At a demo day the scholars tried their algorithms on real hardware. Smith would like the event to become a regular, more public showcase.
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