Jon Francis

Jonathan Francis is a lead research scientist at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI) in Pittsburgh where he leads the Robot Learning Lab—focused on developing dexterous robots that extend the capabilities of humans in industrial and household environments. He is also a courtesy faculty at the Robotics Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), as well as the industry mentor and area expert for robotics in the Carnegie-Bosch Institute, College of Engineering, at CMU. 

Francis’ research includes topics in the areas of robot learning and machine learning (e.g., multimodal representation learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning). He has extensive experience in industrial deployments of AI/ML/robotics methods to indoor environments and has established strong connections to the manufacturing and logistics industrial research sector for co-development through the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center on Human Augmentation via Dexterity and the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute in North America.

Francis’ research record includes over 70 articles in robotics, AI/ML, sensing, and automation conference and journal venues, and he holds over 30 granted and provisional patents in multiple countries. He frequently serves as an area chair, associate editor, scientific advisory board member, and technical program committee member of various robotics, machine learning, and AI conference and journal publication venues, and he is a consistent lead organizer of various academic workshops, tutorials, and special meetings.

His team has won several challenges and best paper awards at various academic venues, such as IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), IEEE-ITS International Automated Vehicle Validation Conference (IAVVC), HomeRobot Open-Vocab Mobile Manipulation Challenge at IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), and Argoverse Motion Forecasting Competition at IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). He is responsible for a diverse portfolio of BCAI and CMU research projects, cross-institutional collaborations, student, junior researcher, and postdoctoral advisees, and publicly-funded activities. 

Francis received his Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at CMU and his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at CMU.