creators

Jim Fan - NVIDIA director of robotics, GEAR co-lead

Linxi "Jim" Fan is NVIDIA's director of robotics and a distinguished research scientist, co-leading the GEAR group behind GR00T, Voyager, Eureka and MineDojo.

Linxi "Jim" Fan is NVIDIA's director of robotics and a distinguished research scientist at NVIDIA Research. He and Yuke Zhu lead its GEAR group - Generalist Embodied Agent Research - which builds foundation models for agents acting in virtual and physical worlds. GR00T, NVIDIA's humanoid-robot foundation model line, is one of the group's projects, alongside Eureka, Voyager, VIMA, MineDojo and EgoScale; Fan announced Project GR00T in March 2024. Fan took his PhD at the Stanford Vision Lab under Fei-Fei Li, graduated valedictorian of Columbia's class of 2016 with the Illig Medal, and interned at OpenAI - by his own account its first intern, in 2016 - as well as at Baidu AI Labs and Mila. He has been at NVIDIA since December 2021. He is first author of MineDojo, an Outstanding Paper award winner at NeurIPS 2022, and an equal advisor, with Anima Anandkumar, on Voyager, a Minecraft agent that writes its own growing library of skills using GPT-4, and on Eureka, which has GPT-4 write reward functions for robot learning and beat expert-written rewards on 83% of 29 tasks.

Specialization

embodied agents, robot foundation models, multimodal learning, reinforcement learning

Country

United States