Pete
Wurman

Profile

Pete received his undergraduate degree from MIT in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He spent 6 years as a professor at North Carolina State University before leaving in 2004 to help co-found Kiva Systems, the company that pioneered mobile robots in warehousing. Kiva was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and has deployed hundreds of thousands of robots to Amazon warehouses around the world. For their invention, Pete and his co-founders were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. While at Amazon, Pete also founded the Amazon Picking Challenge. Pete has over 50 academic papers and 60 patents, and is an IEEE Fellow and AAAI Fellow.

Message

“Throughout my career I've chased challenges at the intersection of AI and real-world applications. For the last 15 years, I've enjoyed building amazing teams of talented people. I take pride in creating a work environment that is fun, productive, and inclusive. At Sony AI, we've hired a fantastic team and are well on our way to building a world class industrial AI research lab.”

Publications

A Super-human Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Autonomous Racing in Gran Turismo

RLC, 2024
Miguel Vasco*, Takuma Seno, Kenta Kawamoto, Kaushik Subramanian, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone

Racing autonomous cars faster than the best human drivers has been a longstanding grand challenge for the fields of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Recently, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent met this challenge in a high-fidelity racing simulator, Gran Tu…

Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Nature, 2022
Pete Wurman, Samuel Barrett, Kenta Kawamoto, James MacGlashan, Kaushik Subramanian, Thomas Walsh, Roberto Capobianco, Alisa Devlic, Franziska Eckert, Florian Fuchs, Leilani Gilpin, Piyush Khandelwal, Varun Kompella, Hao Chih Lin, Patrick MacAlpine, Declan Oller, Takuma Seno, Craig Sherstan, Michael D. Thomure, Houmehr Aghabozorgi, Leon Barrett, Rory Douglas, Dion Whitehead Amago, Peter Dürr, Peter Stone, Michael Spranger, Hiroaki Kitano

Many potential applications of artificial intelligence involve making real-time decisions in physical systems while interacting with humans. Automobile racing represents an extreme example of these conditions; drivers must execute complex tactical manoeuvres to pass or block…

Agent-Based Markov Modeling for Improved COVID-19 Mitigation Policies

JAIR, 2021
Roberto Capobianco, Varun Kompella, James Ault*, Guni Sharon*, Stacy Jong*, Spencer Fox*, Lauren Meyers*, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone

The year 2020 saw the covid-19 virus lead to one of the worst global pandemics in history. As a result, governments around the world have been faced with the challenge of protecting public health while keeping the economy running to the greatest extent possible. Epidemiologi…

Blog

December 5, 2023 | Game AI

RPOSST: Testing an AI Agent for Deployment in the Real World

Bleary-eyed engineers know the anxiety that comes with a deployment, and the importance of testing every aspect of a product before it goes to the “real world.” Will the response time be fast enough? Is there a combination of user…

Bleary-eyed engineers know the anxiety that comes with a deployment, and the importance of testing every aspect of a product befor…

June 14, 2022 | Gaming | GT Sophy

Peeking Under the Hood of GT Sophy

In early 2020, the incredible research and engineering team at Sony AI set out to do something that had never been done before: create an AI agent that could beat the best drivers in the world at the PlayStation® 4 game Gran Turis…

In early 2020, the incredible research and engineering team at Sony AI set out to do something that had never been done before: cr…

News

July 22, 2022 | Press Release

Sony AI’s Pete Wurman to Deliver Keynote at IJCAI on Training the World’s Best G…

Tokyo, Japan – July 22, 2022 -- Sony AI, a leader in human-centric artificial intelligence (AI) established with the mission to unleash human imagination and creativity with AI, t…

May 6, 2022 | Press Release

Sony AI’s Peter Wurman Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame

Tokyo, Japan — May 6, 2022 — Peter Wurman, Director, Sony AI America, has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF). During the 2022 National Inventors Hall of …

February 21, 2022 | Press Release

Sony AI’s Peter Wurman Named 2022 Fellow by the Association for the Advancement …

Tokyo, Japan – February 21, 2022 -- Peter Wurman, Director, Sony AI America, has been named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Peter…

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