Allan Jabri named 2018 Soros Fellow

CS graduate student Allan Jabri has been named a 2018 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow.   Soros Fellowships are awarded to outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants from across the globe who are pursuing graduate school in the United States.  Recipients are chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to US society, culture, or their academic fields, and will receive up to $90K in funding over two years.  Jabri was born in Australia to parents from China and Lebanon and was raised in the US.   He received his B.S. at Princeton where his thesis focused on probabilistic methods for egocentric scene understanding, and worked as a research engineer at Facebook AI Research in New York before joining Berkeley AI Research (BAIR).  He  is interested in problems related to self-supervised learning, continual learning, intrinsic motivation, and embodied cognition. His long-term goal is to build learning algorithms that allow machines to autonomously acquire visual and sensorimotor common sense. During his time at Berkeley, he also hopes to mentor students, contribute to open source code projects, and develop a more interdisciplinary perspective on AI.