Bio: James A. (Drew) Bagnell is Chief Technology Officer of Aurora (aurora.tech), where he works with an amazing team to develop and deliver self-driving safely, quickly and broadly. Dr. Bagnell has worked for 19 years at the intersection of machine learning and robotics with expertise in self-driving cars, imitation and reinforcement learning, planning, and computational perception. Aurora was founded in 2017 to enable autonomous driving solutions that will make roads safer, improve lives, revitalize cities, and expand transportation access.

Dr. Bagnell is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and Machine Learning Department. His interests in artificial intelligence range from algorithmic and basic theoretical development to delivering fielded learning-based systems. Bagnell and his research group have received over a dozen research awards for publications in both the robotics and machine learning communities including best paper awards at ICML, RSS, and ICRA.

He received the 2016 Ryan Award, Carnegie Mellon University’s award for Meritorious Teaching, and served as the founding director of the Robotics Institute Summer Scholars program, a summer research experience that has enabled hundreds of undergraduates throughout the world to leap into robotics research.