Peter Haas

Peter is the Associate Director of the Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative at Brown University where he works supporting cross disciplinary research in AI, robotics, and IOT, focusing on impacts on society. He is involved in research projects using Abstract and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, Temporal Logic, Motion Planning, Deep Learning, and visualizations in virtual reality and augmented reality.

He was the Co-founder and COO of XactSense, a high growth early stage start up producing next generation ROS based aerial robots for laser scanning the built environment using LIDAR and SLAM. Prior to this he was the founder of AIDG a small and medium enterprise development charity that did business incubation and product commercialization.

Peter has become an active voice for AI, Robotics and poverty issues, speaking at TED Global, Better World by Design, the World Bank, Harvard, MIT and other forums. His work with AIDG has been featured in Fast Company, Popular Mechanics, NPR, Discover, and Forbes. He was a 2006 Echoing Green Fellow, a 2008 Waldzell Institute Architect of the Future, and a 2010 TED Senior Fellow. His TEDxDirigo talk on AI has over one million views on Youtube.

He has 5 years of product design experience for the poor in AIDG's research and development department. Peter brings a multidisciplinary approach to any product design problem with a strong understanding of end constituent needs.

He holds a BA in Philosophy from Yale.