PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Roozbeh Mottaghi

Roozbeh Mottaghi is a computer vision and embodied AI researcher whose simulators and benchmarks teach AI agents to see, plan and act in homes. After a computer science PhD at UCLA under Alan Yuille and a postdoc at Stanford University, he joined the Allen Institute for AI in 2015, where he helped build the AI2-THOR simulator and coauthored ProcTHOR, a 2022 NeurIPS Outstanding Paper. From 2022 to 2026 he managed a team of more than 20 people at Meta FAIR, serving as a project lead on Habitat 3.0 and coauthoring the PARTNR benchmark. Since 2026, he is a member of technical staff at Skild AI and an affiliate associate professor at the University of Washington.

Works
130
Citations
10,794
h-index
37
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2008–2014

    A UCLA PhD and Stanford postdoc

    He studies for a computer science PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2008 to 2013, advised by Alan Yuille. A postdoctoral position in Stanford University's Computational Vision and Geometry Lab follows from 2013 to 2014.

  2. 2015–2016

    Joining the Allen Institute for AI

    In 2015, he joins the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle as a research scientist. Newtonian Image Understanding, a CVPR 2016 paper with Hessam Bagherinezhad, Mohammad Rastegari and Ali Farhadi, builds a system that predicts how objects in a still image will behave, learning from more than 10,000 images paired with 3D physics-engine renderings.

  3. 2016–2017

    The AI2-THOR simulator

    In the summer of 2016, he and colleagues at the Allen Institute for AI begin developing THOR (The House Of inteRactions), a photorealistic 3D environment where AI agents practice interacting with objects. The first version of AI2-THOR, released in December 2017, includes 120 scenes of kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms.

  4. 2020–2022

    Research manager of PRIOR

    In 2020, he becomes a research manager on the PRIOR team at the Allen Institute for AI and holds the role until 2022. RoboTHOR, an open simulation-to-real embodied AI platform with him among its authors, appears at CVPR 2020.

  5. 2022

    A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award

    ProcTHOR, a framework that generates embodied AI environments procedurally, wins an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. He shares the award with Matt Deitke, Ali Farhadi, Ani Kembhavi and colleagues, and the paper is one of 13 chosen from 2,672 accepted papers.

  6. 2022–2026

    Embodied AI research at Meta

    He joins Meta in 2022 and works at FAIR as a senior AI research scientist manager, leading a team of more than 20 people on dexterous manipulation, 3D perception, long-horizon planning and reasoning, vision-language-action models and robot simulators. By 2023, the University of Washington's Allen School counts him among its affiliate professors.

  7. 2024–2025

    Habitat 3.0 and PARTNR

    He is a project lead of Habitat 3.0, an embodied AI simulator for collaboration between humans, avatars and robots in home environments, presented at ICLR 2024. PARTNR, a benchmark of 100,000 natural language tasks for human-robot planning and reasoning, follows at ICLR 2025 with him among its authors, and LLM-based planners solve 30% of its tasks.

  8. Since 2026

    Joining Skild AI

    In 2026, he leaves Meta for Skild AI, where he is a member of technical staff leading post-training for robotics foundation models. He remains an affiliate associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and in June 2026 he gives a keynote at the Workshop on Multimodal Spatial Intelligence at CVPR 2026.

Career

  1. Since 2026Skild AIMember of Technical Staff
  2. Since 2017University of WashingtonAffiliate Associate Professor
  3. 2022–2026FAIR (Meta)Senior AI Research Scientist Manager
  4. 2015–2022Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Research Scientist, Research Manager
  5. 2013–2014Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral Fellow
  6. 2005–2007Simon Fraser University

Education

  1. 2013University of California, Los AngelesPhD

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

Most-cited works

  1. Target-driven visual navigation in indoor scenes using deep reinforcement learning2017 · IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation · 1,533 citationsWith Abhinav Gupta, Ali Farhadi, Fei-Fei Li and Yuke Zhu
  2. The Role of Context for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in the Wild2014 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 1,437 citationsWith Alan L. Yuille, Raquel Urtasun, Sanja Fidler and Seong-Whan Lee
  3. Beyond PASCAL: A benchmark for 3D object detection in the wild2014 · IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision · 727 citationsWith Silvio Savarese
  4. OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge2019 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 727 citationsWith Ali Farhadi
  5. Detect What You Can: Detecting and Representing Objects Using Holistic Models and Body Parts2014 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 604 citationsWith Alan L. Yuille, Raquel Urtasun and Sanja Fidler

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Roozbeh Mottaghi. 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. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Roozbeh Mottaghi. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Washington. 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.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of Washington. 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.

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. Roozbeh Mottaghi's Webpage roozbehm.info. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Roozbeh Mottaghi | alphaXiv alphaxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. What Robots Can Learn from Babies technologyreview.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Publications - Roozbeh Mottaghi roozbehm.info. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Interactive Simulation Teaches AI About Real World spectrum.ieee.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Allen School and AI2 researchers recognized at NeurIPS for outstanding contributions in large-scale embodied AI and next-generation image-text models news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper Awards neurips.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots aihabitat.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. PARTNR: A Benchmark for Planning and Reasoning in Embodied Multi-agent Tasks aihabitat.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. 2nd MUSI Workshop @ CVPR 2026 musi-workshop.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.