Pramod Anantharam

Researcher and Engineer | Machine Learning, Text Mining, Computer Vision | 👨🏾‍🏫 Teaching by story telling, 🎮 EdGames, and 🤖 Robotics

[Marco Pavone @drmapavone]

Ever wondered what it’s like to learn robot autonomy @Stanford? Now you can.

Today, we’re opening up the robot autonomy teaching materials that my collaborators and I have been developing over the past several years—for anyone, anywhere, completely free.

At the heart of this effort is Principles of Robot Autonomy (PoRA), a textbook inspired by the Stanford robot autonomy course series I’ve been teaching since 2017.

Robot autonomy has evolved from a research discipline into a technology deployed in the real world. Building capable autonomous systems requires more than understanding individual algorithms: it requires understanding how perception, state estimation, planning, control, and learning work together in a complete autonomy stack.

That’s what we set out to teach with PoRA: bringing classical robotics and modern AI together in one coherent framework, grounded in both theory and practice.

Coming soon in print from Cambridge University Press, Principles of Robot Autonomy is also freely available online and comes with a comprehensive collection of open educational resources:

📖 Textbook, https://t.co/wRvXr4VCIP — Foundations of robot autonomy, from classical methods to modern AI-based approaches.

🎥 Video lectures, https://t.co/Yw3P1aGzBG Lectures from my Stanford courses on robot autonomy and on optimal and learning-based control.

💻 Interactive exercises, https://t.co/kyPV8AnyB3 — Hands-on Python implementations and Jupyter notebooks.

📝 Teaching materials, https://t.co/a6MqqYAcEN — Lecture slides and resources for instructors.

🌐 Explore all PoRA resources, https://t.co/oAsjrMJxZT — Including Ask the Book, an AI study assistant integrated throughout the textbook to answer questions, explain derivations, and connect ideas across chapters.

📣 Read the Stanford announcement: https://t.co/f6BBBZZQmg

Our goal is simple: to make high-quality education in robot autonomy accessible to students, researchers, engineers, educators, and anyone curious about how autonomous robotic systems work.

I believe that sharing knowledge is fundamental to the mission of a university. Autonomous robotics—and Physical AI more broadly—are among the defining technological frontiers of our time. We want to help more people understand these technologies, build with them, and advance the field.

A huge thank you to my co-authors, @DanieleGammelli, Joseph Lorenzetti, @katielulula, and @GioeleZardini, and to everyone who helped bring this project to life.

Explore the resources, use them in your own learning or teaching, and please share them with anyone who might find them useful!

#Robotics #PhysicalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AutonomousSystems #Education

@Stanford @StanfordEng @StanfordAILab @StanfordHAI

[Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson]

I started my company 16 years, 3 months, and 5 days ago.

Today, it went public.

But let's rewind for a second...

5,939 days ago, I was a barista at a small cafe called @2percentJazz2, in Victoria, Canada.

I made $6.50 an hour.

Two guys, Chris and Jeff, started coming into the cafe.

They'd sit there all day drinking espresso and typing away on their laptops, using the wifi.

After weeks of this, I asked them what they did for a living.

Didn't they have jobs?

They told me they were "web designers" and this — sitting on their laptops — was their job.

As I dug in, they told me how it worked:

They asked local businesses if they needed a website, then charged them a couple thousand bucks to make one.

They could whip a website together in a few days, and each make $1,000.

Simple.

This blew my mind.

And at that moment, I realized something:

I wanted to be the guy drinking the espresso, not the one serving it.

Chris and Jeff were clearly smart, but I knew some basic HTML and figured I could do the same.

I decided to try it out.

When I got off my shift, I took the bus over to a book store downtown and bought a book called 'Bulletproof Web Design' by Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) to hone my skills.

Then, I googled "freelance web design jobs" and found a tech job board called Authentic Jobs made by this guy in Utah, @cameronmoll.

There were hundreds of posts, mostly from startups in San Francisco, looking for freelance web designers.

I decided to try to win one of these contracts, but I had a critical insight:

Nobody wants to hire an 18-year-old barista to build their website.

So, I decided I'd create a fake design agency.

Using tricks from Dan Cederholm's book, I whipped together a slick looking site and called my "agency" MetaLab (after the <meta> tag in HTML).

The website was very vague as to what exactly MetaLab did, who worked there, or where we were located.

It also featured a cringe-inducing tagline "We Help People Make Cool Stuff."

Like an email spammer, I started sending emails to every single web design job post I could find.

I was met with crickets, until I got an email from a guy named Kavin Stewart (@kavinstewart).

He worked at a startup called Offermatica in San Francisco and told me he needed an interface designed for a web app.

I barely understood what a web app was, but I assured him I could do it.

He proposed a $2,000 USD budget and my eyes went wide.

This was more than I earned in a month, and the project was just a few days of work.

I walked into the cafe the next day and quit my job.

I told myself that if I could just make enough money to wake up whenever I wanted and comfortably make rent, I'd be good.

The rest is history.

But I slightly overshot.

I still own MetaLab, but along the way me and my business partner @_Sparling_ started dozens of companies, then began buying wonderful businesses, including one (Dribbble) — amazingly — from Dan Cederholm, the designer whose book I bought when I first started.

Today, Tiny went public, and as of this moment has a market capitalization of just under $800 million.

I can't even begin to explain how mind boggling this is to me.

This has not been a feat of entrepreneurial genius.

My key skill has been choosing incredible people to work with, both internally and externally, and I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has worked at Tiny and our various companies over the years.

And a special thanks to @simplebits, @cameronmoll, and @kavinstewart for helping with my first step😉

Watch for us on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker TINY (how cool is that ticker?).

https://t.co/tlpgiEO2MU

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Trying to deploy a container on kubernetes as fast as as possible. @mogenius was the best option I found to do this. It's ease of use is great. Hookup your GitHub repo which conatins docker-compose, setup CI/CD, and voila! Your service will be deployed in seconds!

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Very nicely done article with great visuals and storytelling!

McKinsey for Kids: A tiger’s tale about what nature is really worth https://t.co/MguMaQJD4h via @McKinsey

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Buy Crazyflie2.1 assembly and first flight eBook on @Gumroad https://t.co/cR1wPymKYY

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

If you are interested in an hands-on tutorial on multiple object tracking, I just published Understanding Object Tracking: A Hands-on Approach, Part 1 https://t.co/5FKRnK9ske

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

I just published Porting Motion Planning Project to Crazyflie https://t.co/RPgK7Z6Jhc

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

I just published Porting Backyard Flyer Project to Crazyflie https://t.co/gnmugvDnW5

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Here is a fun project I'm working on in my spare time related to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and specifically, my experience assembling Crazyflie2.1 -- https://t.co/CdTNSOWpMu #uav

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

If you want to play with Stereo Vision, here is my blog post implementing a basic Stereo Vision prototype in Python and it's parallelization using C++: https://t.co/0C1CZJsoSh

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

“Andrew Ng Says Enough Papers, Let’s Build AI Now!” by @Synced_Global https://t.co/QIcuz4x1oG

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Analytics as a Source of Business Innovation https://t.co/j0VcfUZOdm via @mitsmr

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

“Revenue models for bots and chatbots” by @ashevat https://t.co/wws94RwcSJ

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Making data analytics work for you--instead of the other way around | McKinsey &amp; Company https://t.co/9gUxRTITsu

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Kalman Filters historically used to solve pratctial problems -- https://t.co/gJcS3j0N6Q

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Amazon doesn’t just sell books anymore. Clearly Uber doesn’t just want to be about rides. https://t.co/kzbCq0chWJ via @WIRED

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity - via @techreview https://t.co/14KATZDb6T

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

David Barber's session on @Quora https://t.co/lCnCifiwDH

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

Google’s AI Wins Fifth And Final Game Against Go Genius Lee Sedol https://t.co/ajTTzFGSGU via @WIRED

[Pramod Anantharam @pramodatre]

“What do games tell us about intelligence?” by @jugander https://t.co/7RXE7hIUFD