Daniel Seita

Daniel Seita is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Southern California and the director of the Sensing, Learning, and Understanding for Robotic Manipulation (SLURM) Lab. His research interests are in computer vision, machine learning, and foundation models for robot manipulation, focusing on improving performance in visually and geometrically challenging settings. Daniel was previously a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He received undergraduate degrees in math and computer science from Williams College. Daniel's research has been supported by a six-year Graduate Fellowship for STEM Diversity and by a two-year Berkeley Fellowship. He has the Honorable Mention for Best Paper award at UAI 2017, was an RSS 2022 Pioneer, and has presented work at premier robotics conferences such as ICRA, IROS, RSS, and CoRL.

seita@usc.edu

takeshidanny@gmail.com

If you are contacting me to inquire about research opportunities, please check my lab website for more information. You do not need to email me to ask if I am taking on PhD students, and I am unable to evaluate or make decisions over email. I am much more likely to respond to emails tailored to me, in contrast to mass emails (please don't send them).

USC has an aggressive spam filter which may cause me to miss some non-USC emails, so it's OK if you want to also cc the Gmail there. (This is why some USC faculty list their Gmail as their contact information.)

There is no need to address me as "Dear Sir," "Esteemed Professor," "Respected Professor," or other excessively formal phrases that might be used in mass emails (and which I get in my inbox). You can just write "Prof. Seita," "Professor Seita," or just "Daniel." For in-person conversations, I believe my last name is pronounced like "say-ta" with two syllables.

I do my best to learn about other cultures, countries, and governments, by reading and consulting a wide variety of references. With respect to any group's political leadership, there are a range of policy issues to which I might agree or disagree. I am careful to not conflate a country's political leadership and the opinions of a citizen of that country.

I fully support people from all across the world coming to our country's schools and institutions. I think the highly international nature of Robotics and AI is one of its best qualities, and I hope it remains like this. I am not afraid to criticize or critique the U.S. government if they put up roadblocks to this. Students who come from abroad can expect to have me as an ally.