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Portrait of Dieter Fox
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Dieter Fox

Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; head of the RSE-Lab, University of Washington

Dieter Fox is a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where Fox heads the Robotics and State Estimation Lab (RSE-Lab), and now shares time between UW and Ai2, whose Robotics team Fox leads. Fox's research covers robotics, artificial intelligence and state estimation, with much of it on perception and its connection to control. In 2017 Fox joined NVIDIA Research to start a robotics research lab aimed at robots that manipulate the physical world and interact naturally with people. Fox is a co-author of NVIDIA's 2025 GR00T N1 and Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform papers, and is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM and IEEE.123456

At a glance

Current roles
Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; head of the RSE-Lab +1 more
Sector
University
Education
UW
Work listed
2
Honors
8
Sources cited
7
Profile reviewed

Career

Dieter Fox joined the University of Washington faculty in the fall of 2000, where Fox heads the Robotics and State Estimation Lab. Fox now divides time between UW and the Allen Institute for AI, where Fox leads the Robotics team and focuses on foundation models for robotics.123

In 2017 Fox joined NVIDIA Research to start a robotics research lab, and led that lab for nearly eight years before moving to Ai2. Fox has also served as an editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2010 to 2015, as program chair of the AAAI Conference in 2008 and of Robotics: Science and Systems in 2013, and on the RSS Foundation board.421

Research

Fox's research aims to let systems interact intelligently with people and their surroundings. Much of it concerns perception and its link to control, extracting useful information from raw sensor data for human activity recognition, 3D mapping and tracking, and robot manipulation.12

At NVIDIA, Fox was among the authors of the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform paper, which released open-weight world models for physical AI, and of GR00T N1, an open foundation model for humanoid robots. The Ai2 Robotics team that Fox leads builds scalable simulation domains to study how robot foundation models scale and generalize.653

Work and contributions

  • NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1 Published research

    Listed among the authors of "GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots" (March 2025).5

  • NVIDIA Cosmos Open weights

    Listed among the authors of "Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI" (January 2025), whose abstract states that Cosmos is open-source with open-weight models under permissive licenses.6

Timeline

  1. Joined the University of Washington faculty.1
  2. Served as program chair of the AAAI Conference.1
  3. Began serving as an editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, a role held until 2015.1
  4. Served as program chair of Robotics, Science and Systems.1
  5. Announced joining NVIDIA Research to start a robotics research lab.4
  6. Co-authored the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI paper.6
  7. Co-authored the GR00T N1 open foundation model for humanoid robots.5

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

  • Joined NVIDIA Research in 2017 to start its Robotics Research Lab, which Fox then led, NVIDIA42

Honors and recognition

  • IEEE RAS Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award · IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, 20201
  • IJCAI John McCarthy Award · International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence12
  • ACM Fellow · Association for Computing Machinery1
  • IEEE Fellow · IEEE1
  • AAAI Fellow · Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence1
  • AAAI Classic Paper Award · Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 20171
  • CVPR Best Paper Award · IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 20151
  • ECCAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award · European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), 20001

Where they work

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References

7 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Dieter Fox — homepageDieter Fox · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Dieter Fox, Professor — Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Washington · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. Research Scientist, Robotics — Ai2 job posting ("Ai2's Robotics team is led by Dieter Fox")The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. New position at Nvidia Research — Dieter FoxDieter Fox · Announcement · published Oct 31, 2017 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots (arXiv 2503.14734)arXiv · Paper · published Mar 18, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI (arXiv 2501.03575)arXiv · Paper · published Jan 7, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  7. Team Directory — Ai2Ai2 · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026