PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Piper Wolters

Piper Wolters is a research engineer at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence whose work spans satellite-image datasets, open vision-language models and robot learning. They studied computer science at Western Washington University, where Brian Hutchinson advised them. In 2023, they coauthored SatlasPretrain, a remote sensing dataset with 302M labels, and an ocean conservation paper that won best paper at NeurIPS Computational Sustainability. They were among the 50 authors of Molmo and PixMo in 2024, which received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR in 2025, and in 2026 they coauthored MolmoSpaces, MolmoBot and MolmoWeb. They are a Research Engineer at PRIOR, the Computer Vision team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Works
15
Citations
262
h-index
5

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2020–2021

    Audio studies at Western Washington

    At Western Washington University, they earn a B.S. and an M.S. in computer science, advised by Brian Hutchinson. In 2020, they coauthor A Study of Few-Shot Audio Classification for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, with Chris Careaga, Hutchinson and Lauren Phillips. A 2021 paper with Chris Daw, Hutchinson and Phillips covers proposal-based few-shot sound event detection with Perceivers.

  2. 2022

    First place in xView3

    In 2022, they coauthor Vessel Detection in Sentinel-1 Imagery with Favyen Bastani, Rose Hendrix, Joseph Ferdinando and Aniruddha Kembhavi. The work earns US 1st Place in the xView3 Competition.

  3. 2023

    SatlasPretrain and ocean monitoring

    In 2023, they coauthor SatlasPretrain at ICCV with Favyen Bastani, Ritwik Gupta, Joe Ferdinando and Aniruddha Kembhavi, a remote sensing dataset with 302M labels under 137 categories whose pre-training raises average downstream accuracy by 18% over ImageNet. Their paper Satellite Imagery and AI: A New Era in Ocean Conservation, written with Patrick Beukema, Favyen Bastani, Yawen Zheng, Henry Herzog and Joe Ferdinando, wins best paper at NeurIPS Computational Sustainability 2023. It presents four open-source computer vision models deployed in Skylight, a real-time maritime monitoring platform.

  4. 2024

    Coauthoring Molmo and PixMo

    In September 2024, they join 49 other authors on the arXiv paper Molmo and PixMo. It introduces Molmo, a family of open vision-language models, and the PixMo datasets, all collected without external vision-language models.

  5. 2025

    A CVPR honorable mention

    Molmo and PixMo, which they coauthor, receives a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR in 2025. They also coauthor OPTIMUS with Paul Seulchan Han, Raymond Yu, Josh Myers-Dean and Favyen Bastani at WACV 2025.

  6. 2026

    MolmoSpaces and MolmoBot

    In February 2026, they are among the authors of MolmoSpaces, an open ecosystem of more than 230k indoor environments for benchmarking robot policies, published at RSS 2026. In March 2026, they are among the authors of MolmoBot, which shows that large-scale simulated training data supports zero-shot transfer to real robots and releases MolmoBot-Data, a dataset of 1.8 million expert trajectories. MolmoBot wins a Best Paper Award at three ICRA 2026 workshops.

  7. April 2026

    MolmoWeb, an open web agent

    In April 2026, they are an equal-contribution lead author of MolmoWeb, with Tanmay Gupta, Zixian Ma and Peter Sushko. MolmoWeb is a family of fully open multimodal web agents in 4B and 8B sizes that predict the next browser action from a task instruction and a webpage screenshot, and the work appears at ECCV 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research Engineer at PRIOR

    They are a Research Engineer at PRIOR, the Computer Vision team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and have collaborated there with Tanmay Gupta, Ani Kembhavi and Favyen Bastani.

Career

  1. Since 2023Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Research Engineer

Education

  1. Western Washington UniversityB.S. and M.S. in computer science

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. SatlasPretrain: A Large-Scale Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding2023 · IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) · 162 citationsWith Aniruddha Kembhavi and Favyen Bastani
  2. Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models2025 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 66 citationsWith Ali Farhadi, Andrew Head, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Chris Callison-Burch, Chris Newell and Christopher Clark
  3. Zooming Out on Zooming In: Advancing Super-Resolution for Remote Sensing2023 · 10 citationsWith Aniruddha Kembhavi and Favyen Bastani
  4. Proposal-based Few-shot Sound Event Detection for Speech and Environmental Sounds with Perceivers2021 · 8 citations
  5. A Study of Few-Shot Audio Classification2020 · 5 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  3. 72% of AI researchers with top works connect into a single 2,592-person co-author groupIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We map the co-author network across 3,593 people shaping AI and 14,977 most-cited papers: 2,592 (72%) form one connected group with a median distance of 5 steps, led in 2-step reach by Yoshua Bengio (570) and in shortest-path bridging by Yoshua Bengio (6.7%).
  4. Direct Form 990 pay in the latest returns of 39 nonprofits with AI people on this site is highest at $2.1M at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) (2024)Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). IRS Form 990 compensation across 39 nonprofits with AI people on this site from 2012 to 2025: in the latest returns, Mozilla reports $6.1M including related-company pay (2024) and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) leads direct nonprofit pay at $2.1M (2024).

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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  1. Piper Wolters piperwolters.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. [2211.15660] SatlasPretrain: A Large-Scale Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. ICCV 2023 Open Access Repository: SatlasPretrain openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. [2312.03207] Satellite Imagery and AI: A New Era in Ocean Conservation, from Research to Deployment and Impact (Version. 2.0) arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. [2409.17146] Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. [2602.11337] MolmoSpaces: A Large-Scale Open Ecosystem for Robot Navigation and Manipulation arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Robotics: Science and Systems XXII - Online Proceedings: MolmoSpaces roboticsproceedings.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. [2603.16861] MolmoB0T: Large-Scale Simulation Enables Zero-Shot Manipulation arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. [2604.08516] MolmoWeb: Open Visual Web Agent and Open Data for the Open Web arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.