Marcel Torne Villasevil

I am a PhD student at Stanford University. My dream is to design the next generation of learning-based assistive robots. I plan to get there by studying methods for in-context adaptation of policies to unseen scenarios while emphasizing human-centric approaches.

Previously, I obtained my Master's degree at Harvard University supported by the Real Colegio Complutense scholarship. And I was part of the Improbable AI Lab at MIT CSAIL under the supervision of Professors Pulkit Agrawal and Abhishek Gupta. Even before that, I received my Bachelor's degree from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where I was lucky enough to do my bachelor's project at MLO and iGH under the supervision of Professors Martin Jaggi and Mary-Anne Hartley. There I started an open source platform, DisCO, for training ML models in a federated and decentralized fashion. I showed its usefulness training Computer Vision models for Healthcare.

In industry, I have interned at Physical Intelligence where I worked on adding memory to VLAs. Before that, I interned at Microsoft Bing and Amazon Search working on their ranking algorithms.

I spend my free time running, sailing, and biking; playing the baroque guitar; or reading books.

My dream is to give people the tools to dedicate their life to what they really want to do. If you had to dream big, what would you do?

How do I plan to do this? I want to develop robots that expand human capabilities. Robots that will help us build new amazing physical things, from helping increase productivity in agriculture, construction and manufacturing, to exoskeletons that will help regain the mobility of those impaired, to a robot that will help you with your hobbies like building your next watch or windsurf board.

Giving such robots to the world will expand human capabilities and resources to the point that I hope they will give economic independence to the general population and allow people to dedicate their life to whatever they want.

I dedicate 99% of my professional energy on the above. But I acknowledge that getting to do what you really want can also be bottlenecked by lack of experience or guidance. Many people have guided and helped me get where I am, my dream school and dream lab to do the research I want to do. I try spending some time helping others who, like me, were uncertain how to reach their Moonshot goals, through Project Moonshot.