Chelsea Finn was born on October 8, 1992. She is an American computer scientist and an assistant professor at Stanford University. Her research studies how robots can learn from interacting with each other, with the goal of creating robots that can learn new skills on their own. Before working at Stanford, she was employed by Google. Currently, she is a co-founder of the startup company called Physical Intelligence.

Early life and education

Finn was an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She later attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2018 under the guidance of Pieter Abbeel and Sergey Levine. During her time at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab (BAIR), her research focused on gradient-based algorithms. These algorithms help machines "learn to learn," a process that is more similar to how humans learn compared to traditional machine learning systems. The techniques, called "meta-learning," train machines to adapt quickly, allowing them to learn efficiently in new situations. While earning her doctorate, she worked as an intern at Google Brain, where she studied robot learning algorithms based on deep predictive models. She taught a large-scale open online course on deep reinforcement learning. Finn was the first woman to receive the C.V. & Daulat Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award.

Research and career

Finn studies how robots can gain intelligence by learning and interacting with their environment. She used advanced computer programs to teach robots how to see and control their movements at the same time.

She created special methods to train computer systems to analyze student code and give helpful suggestions. She showed that the system could adjust quickly with little help from teachers. She tested the program on Code in Place, a course with 12,000 students offered yearly by Stanford University. She found that 97.9% of the students agreed with the feedback provided.

Awards and honors

• 2016 C.V. & Daulat Ramamoorthy Outstanding Research Award
• 2017 Promising Talent in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• 2018 MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35
• 2018 ACM Best Doctoral Thesis Award
• 2020 Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Researcher of the Year
• 2020 Intel Promising Faculty Member Award
• 2021 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award
• 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Academic Achievement Award

Select publications

• Finn, Chelsea; Abbeel, Pieter; Levine, Sergey (2017-07-17). "Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks." Published in the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR: 1126–1135. arXiv: 1703.03400.
• Sergey Levine; Chelsea Finn; Trevor Darrell; Pieter Abbeel (2016). "End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies." Published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Volume 17, Issue 39: 1–40. arXiv: 1504.00702. ISSN 1533-7928. Wikidata Q90313375.
• Chelsea Finn; Ian Goodfellow; Sergey Levine (2016). "Unsupervised Learning for Physical Interaction through Video Prediction" (PDF). Published in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Wikidata Q46993574.