Pieter Abbeel (BS/MS EE KU Leuven, 2000; PhD CS Stanford, 2008, Advisor: Andrew Ng) is a professor at UC Berkeley (EECS, BAIR) since 2008, Co-Founder & President at Covariant, Co-Founder at Gradescope, Co-Founder & Faculty Partner at AI@The House and was previously a Research Scientist at OpenAI.

Pieter has developed apprenticeship learning algorithms which have enabled advanced helicopter aerobatics, including maneuvers such as tic-tocs, chaos and auto-rotation, which only exceptional human pilots can perform. His group has enabled the first end-to-end completion of reliably picking up a crumpled laundry article and folding it and has pioneered deep reinforcement learning for robotics, including learning locomotion and visuomotor skills. His work has been featured in many popular press outlets, including BBC, New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Discovery Channel, SmartPlanet and Wired.

His current research focuses on robotics and machine learning with particular focus on deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, meta-learning, learning-to-learn, and AI safety.