Independent research, for working professionals.
Industrial Research Fellows pursue their own research at the Institute, affiliated with one of the Physical AI groups. The fellow sets the direction, and the group gives them a home and people to work with.
The current cohort.
Industrial Research Fellows and the research they're pursuing.
Ronnie Gomez
The Charlot Lab · Industrial Research Fellow
Physical AI and Logistics Management for Telecommunications. Telecommunications runs on a huge, spread-out base of physical assets: towers, fiber, radios, power systems, and the crews and inventory that keep them running. Deploying and maintaining all of it is one of the biggest and least automated costs in the industry. This project looks at how Physical AI can take that work on, with embodied systems that locate and inspect assets, route field crews, track inventory, and coordinate the people and machines that service the network. The hard scientific problem is giving those systems a reliable model of the physical plant and the judgment to act on it when conditions get messy. For operators the payoff is concrete: fewer truck rolls, faster buildouts, less downtime, and lower cost per site.
LinkedIn ↗White paper coming soon
Kat Moore, EdD, MBA
The Glass Lab · Industrial Research Fellow
The Future of Commerce using Physical AI. Commerce is where most people meet new technology, and physical AI is about to change it. This project studies two sides of that shift. The first is the selling floor itself: how embodied AI, from in-store systems and smart fixtures to robots that can show, explain, and hand over a product, changes how goods are sold and how customers experience a store. The second is the workforce. As physical AI enters retail and sales, the people who work in commerce need new skills, and some roles change or move. Drawing on a career in sales and education, this work studies how to develop that workforce so the technology raises what people can do instead of replacing them, and how a business can put physical AI to work on the floor in a way that actually sells.
LinkedIn ↗White paper coming soon
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