How Robots See the World and Act on It

'Gradient Descending' is a series of roundtables on AI: curated deep dives with technical builders. Past roundtables discussions covered RL Environments, Evals, Fine-Tuning, Agent Frameworks, Open Source Models, and Knowledge Graphs with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Scale AI and many more.
We’re joined by Helen Oleynikova, founder building systems for data center rack maintenance, to discuss how robots perceive the world and act on it.
Helen has spent the last 18 years building in robotics across academia and big tech, including Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and ETH Zurich.
In this session, she’ll talk about the technical problems that shaped her view of robotics, what it really takes to get robots to perceive and act in the real world and why she thinks one of the biggest next opportunities sits in the infrastructure behind AI.
We’ll explore:
how robots build a view of the world
what it takes to go from perception to action
why real-world robotics is still so hard
Expect an honest discussion with a curated group of founders and operators building in AI.
Agenda:
Arrivals: 08:30–09:00
Roundtable discussion: 09:00–10:30
See past roundtables here:
https://www.akashbajwa.co/t/ai-roundtables
I agree that photographs and/or video may be taken during the event and used by the hosts on social media and in future promotional materials.