Roberto Calandra

We just released our new work on miniaturizing high-resolution tactile sensors using fiber optics, and open-sourced the new DIGIT Pinky sensor. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2403.05500 Design: github.com/facebookresear…

NeuralFeels is just scratching the surface of what's possible possible with affordable vision and touch— here we focus on in-hand SLAM. Data/code will follow shortly, for more details check out suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

Ross Girschick (@inkynumbers) is leaving FAIR for AI2, following @sainingxie who joined the NYU faculty (yay!), and @georgiagkioxari who went to Caltech, and Hervé Jégou and @AlexDefosse who went to non-profit Kyutai. It's a loss for FAIR, but I'm happy for them. There is absolutely *nothing* *wrong* with scientists from industry labs moving to Academia or non-profits after several years. For some people, it's a natural career transition. At Bell Labs, a decent proportion of scientists would leave after 5 to 10 years and get a faculty position with tenure (skipping the grueling tenure process altogether) in a good place. At different times in your life, priorities change. You've had an impact in one way and may want to try another way. You may want to work with students. You may enjoy the immediate reward of teaching. The fact that you can work at FAIR and get a tenured faculty position in academia after a few years is a feature, not a bug. This transition is possible from FAIR, as it was from Bell Labs, because FAIR practices open research and encourages scientists to publish. It means that you are not taking any risk by starting your career FAIR. Your options are kept open. People move and seed the research ecosystem. It's a Good Thing. And there are lots of awesomely talented young computer vision scientists who have joined FAIR in the last several years, such as Ishan Misra, @alcinos26, Xinlei Chen, Christoph Feichtenhofer... And that's just the West Coast contingent. There are lots of awesome CV people in Paris (of DINOv2 fame) and Montreal (I-JEPA and such).