PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Liam Paull

Liam Paull is a roboticist at Université de Montréal and Mila whose work covers robot learning, mapping and autonomous driving. After a PhD on underwater vehicles at the University of New Brunswick in 2013, he co-led MIT's Duckietown course in 2016 and coauthored the paper on the AI Driving Olympics, first held at NeurIPS in December 2018. In 2019 he became a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and coauthored gradSLAM, a differentiable approach to simultaneous localization and mapping, and he received an IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award in 2020 and the CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Award in 2023. He is an associate professor at Université de Montréal, a core academic member of Mila and director of the Duckietown Foundation, and he co-leads the Montréal Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL).

Now at
Mila, Duckietown Foundation and Montréal Robotics and Embodied AI Lab

Timeline

  1. 2013

    PhD on underwater vehicles

    He completes a PhD at the University of New Brunswick in 2013, co-supervised by Mae Seto, Liuchen Chang and Howard Li. The doctoral work focuses on robust and adaptive planning for underwater vehicles.

  2. 2016

    Duckietown at MIT

    He works on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for underwater robots as a postdoc in John J. Leonard's Marine Robotics Group at MIT. In 2016, as a CSAIL postdoc, he co-leads MIT's new Duckietown course with research scientist Andrea Censi, which aims to build a fleet of 50 duckie-adorned robo-taxis that navigate with one on-board camera and no pre-programmed maps. He also uses the platform to prototype algorithms for CSAIL's $25 million collaboration with Toyota on autonomous cars.

  3. 2017

    Moving from MIT to Montréal

    Having led the CSAIL/Toyota Autonomous Car Project as a research scientist in Daniela Rus's Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT, he teaches at Université de Montréal by the fall of 2017, when classes at Montréal, ETH Zürich, TTI Chicago and NCTU run as one coordinated Duckietown course. He is first author of the 2017 ICRA paper that presents Duckietown as an open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research.

  4. December 2018

    The AI Driving Olympics

    In December 2018, the first AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO), a Duckietown-based competition for machine learning and AI in mobile robotics, takes place at the NeurIPS conference in Montreal. He is one of the 17 authors of the paper that introduces it.

  5. 2019

    A Canada CIFAR AI Chair

    CIFAR appoints him a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila in 2019 and renews the chair in 2025. His group builds representations of the world for simultaneous localization and mapping, models uncertainty, and develops workflows to teach robotic agents new tasks through simulation or demonstration.

  6. 2019–2020

    Differentiable SLAM with gradSLAM

    He coauthors gradSLAM with Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Soroush Saryazdi and Ganesh Iyer, first posted to arXiv in October 2019. The ICRA 2020 paper poses dense SLAM as differentiable computational graphs, so that gradients flow from 3D maps to 2D pixels.

  7. 2020–2023

    Two research awards

    He receives a Best Paper Award from IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters in 2020 and the CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Award in 2023.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Université de Montréal

    He is an associate professor at Université de Montréal, a core academic member of Mila and co-leader of the Montréal Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL), and he directs the Duckietown Foundation. In May 2026, Mila announces a partnership with Torc Robotics, and he welcomes new collaborations between academic labs and autonomous-vehicle companies.

Career

  1. Since 2019MilaCanada CIFAR AI Chair
  2. NowUniversité de MontréalAssociate Professor
  3. NowDuckietown FoundationDirector
  4. NowMontréal Robotics and Embodied AI LabCo-leader
  5. Until 2017Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPostdoc
  6. MIT CSAILPostdoc

Education

  1. 2013University of New BrunswickPhD

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 Liam Paull. 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 Université de Montréal. 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. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Université de Montréal. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Mila. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.

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 Liam Paull yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Liam Paull | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Home | Liam Paull liampaull.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Self-driving cars, meet rubber duckies | MIT News news.mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. A brief history of Duckietown - Duckietown duckietown.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Liam Paull – CIFAR cifar.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. The AI Driving Olympics at NeurIPS 2018 arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. gradSLAM: Automagically differentiable SLAM arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Torc Robotics Partners with Mila in Institute's First-Ever Autonomous-Trucking Collaboration to Advance Physical AI | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.