PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jesse Thomason

Jesse Thomason is a computer scientist whose research grounds natural language in robot perception, multimodal observations and physical action. After earning a bachelor's degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013 and a computer science PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, he completed a postdoc with Luke Zettlemoyer at the University of Washington, where he coauthored the 2019 Vision-and-Dialog Navigation dataset. As a visiting academic at Amazon's Alexa AI from August 2020, he coauthored the TEACh dataset of interactive household-task dialogues, released in October 2021 and published at AAAI 2022. From August 2021, he spent five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California leading the GLAMOR Lab and coauthoring the ProgPrompt robot task-planning work in 2022 and 2023. Since August 2026, he is an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, where he leads the GLAMOR Lab.

Timeline

  1. 2013–2018

    Pittsburgh degree and Texas PhD

    He earns a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. In April 2018, he defends his computer science doctoral dissertation, Continually Improving Grounded Natural Language Understanding through Human-Robot Dialog, at the University of Texas at Austin.

  2. 2018–2020

    Postdoc with Luke Zettlemoyer

    From June 2018 to 2020, he works as a postdoctoral researcher with Luke Zettlemoyer at the University of Washington.

  3. 2019

    Vision-and-Dialog Navigation dataset

    With Michael Murray, Maya Cakmak and Luke Zettlemoyer, he coauthors Vision-and-Dialog Navigation for the 2019 Conference on Robot Learning. The paper introduces Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, a dataset of over 2k embodied, human-human dialogs situated in simulated, photorealistic home environments.

  4. 2020–2022

    Alexa AI and the TEACh dataset

    In August 2020, he becomes a visiting academic at Amazon's Alexa AI. He coauthors TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat, a dataset of over 3,000 human-human, interactive dialogues to complete household tasks in simulation, released as a preprint in October 2021 and accepted at AAAI 2022.

  5. 2021–2026

    Assistant professor at USC

    In August 2021, he becomes an assistant professor in the Viterbi School's Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he leads the Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observations, and Robots (GLAMOR) Lab for five years. The lab builds agents and robots that understand human language through grounded context, jointly training models with language, world perception and physical action.

  6. 2022–2024

    ProgPrompt for robot task planning

    His September 2022 ProgPrompt preprint introduces a programmatic large language model prompt structure for situated robot task plans, and the journal paper with Ishika Singh, Dieter Fox, Animesh Garg and others appears in Autonomous Robots in 2023. In February 2024, a Scientific American article titled Scientists Are Putting ChatGPT Brains Inside Robot Bodies highlights his work and PhD student Singh's work to help robots complete real-world tasks.

  7. September 2025

    A talk on grounded language

    At UT Austin in September 2025, he gives the Forum for Artificial Intelligence talk Embracing Language as Grounded Communication. In the talk, he argues that experience in the world grounds language by tying it to objects, actions and concepts.

  8. Since August 2026

    Associate professor at Georgia Tech

    In August 2026, he joins Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor and moves the GLAMOR Lab there, drawn by the school's reputation in human-computer interaction research. At Georgia Tech, the lab jointly trains models with language, world perception and physical action, uses visual and embodied context for robotics and language-and-vision tasks, and works on speech and sign recognition.

Career

  1. Since 2026Georgia Institute of TechnologyAssociate professor
  2. 2021–2026University of Southern CaliforniaAssistant professor
  3. From 2020AmazonVisiting academic
  4. 2018–2020University of WashingtonPostdoctoral researcher

Education

  1. 2018University of Texas at AustinPhD
  2. 2013University of PittsburghBachelor's degree

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  4. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jesse Thomason yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. USC - Viterbi School of Engineering - Viterbi Faculty Directory viterbi.usc.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Jesse Thomason - GLAMOR jessethomason.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Luke Zettlemoyer homes.cs.washington.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. [1907.04957] Vision-and-Dialog Navigation arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. TEACh: Task-driven embodied agents that chat - Amazon Science amazon.science. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. [2110.00534] TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Embracing Language as Grounded Communication | Texas AI ai.utexas.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. New Associate Professor Sees Research Becoming More Human-Centered | College of Computing cc.gatech.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Jesse Thomason | School of Interactive Computing ic.gatech.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. [2209.11302] ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. Scientists Are Putting ChatGPT Brains Inside Robot Bodies - USC Viterbi | School of Engineering viterbischool.usc.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.