At the April 2023 Innovation Hour, Hertz Fellows Laura Herlant, research scientist at Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and David Van Valen, assistant professor at Caltech, provided an in-depth look at artificial intelligence from a spectrum of real world applications.

Herlant's research focuses on embodying artificial intelligence into mechanical platforms to create robots that can cope with the uncertainty of the world and interact meaningfully with humans. In her presentation, Herlant will discuss her mission to solve the most important and fundamental challenges in AI and robotics to enable future generations of intelligent machines and help us all live better lives.

Van Valen described DeepCell, a collection of software tools that meet the data, model, and deployment challenges associated with deep learning. These include tools for distributed labeling of biological imaging data, a collection of modern deep learning architectures tailored for biological-image analysis tasks, and cloud-native software for making deep learning methods accessible to the broader life science community. Van Valen discussed how his team has used DeepCell to label large-scale imaging datasets to power deep learning methods that achieve human-level performance and enable new experimental designs for imaging-based experiments.