IITK Foundation IITKDF

Prof. Deepak Pathak

(BT/CSE/2014)

Prof. Deepak Pathak is the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is a faculty member in the Robotics Institute and is affiliated with the Machine Learning Department. He is also the Co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, where he is leading the development of a general-purpose AI foundation model for robotics.





Profile

Prof. Pathak graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2014 with a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering, earning the Institute Gold Medal. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2019. He subsequently worked as a researcher at Meta AI Research and as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley.

His research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Robotics, with a focus on building intelligent robots capable of learning, adapting, and operating in diverse real-world environments. His contributions to self-supervised learning, curiosity-driven exploration, embodied AI, and robot learning have significantly influenced the field. His work has been featured in leading international publications including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Quanta Magazine, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, Vox, and CNET.

Honours and Recognition

  • IEEE Computer Society Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Young Researcher Award (2026)
  • Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award (2026)
  • Sloan Research Fellowship (2025)
  • MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Award (2024)
  • Appointed Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2024)
  • Okawa Research Award (2022)
  • Young Alumnus Award, IIT Kanpur (2022)
  • Recipient of faculty research awards from Google, Samsung, Sony, and GoodAI
  • Awarded graduate fellowships from Facebook, NVIDIA, and Snapchat during his Ph.D.
  • Recipient of multiple Best Paper awards and recognitions at leading AI and robotics conferences, including CVPR and RSS.

Last updated Jul 03, 2026