Postdoctoral Fellow, MARA & Robotics

About the role

This Basis Postdoctoral Fellowship is a collaborative initiative between the Basis Research Institute and the Princeton Robot Planning and Learning group, led by Tom Silver. As a fellow, you will be a key contributor and leader of robotics efforts within our ambitious MARA (Modeling, Abstraction, and Reasoning Agent) project, which aims to develop foundational AI technologies that enable systems to actively discover abstract models of the world and reason with them to achieve goals.

Basis is a nonprofit applied AI research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals. The first is to understand and build intelligence. This means to establish the mathematical principles of what it means to reason, to learn, to make decisions, to understand, and to explain; and to construct software that implements these principles. The second is to advance society’s ability to solve intractable problems. This means expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems that we can solve today, and even more importantly, accelerating our ability to solve problems in the future. To achieve these goals, we’re building both a new technological foundation that draws inspiration from how humans reason, and a new kind of collaborative organization that puts human values first.

Tom Silver is an assistant professor in Princeton University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a core faculty member in robotics. He directs the Princeton Robot Planning and Learning (PRPL) group, whose mission is to develop generalist robots that plan and learn to help people. Prior to joining Princeton, Tom was a postdoctoral researcher with Tapo Bhattacharjee at Cornell from