Pete received his undergraduate degree from MIT in Mechanical Engineering. After a few years, he went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He spent 6 years as a professor at North Carolina State University before leaving in 2004 to help co-found Kiva Systems. Kiva was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and has deployed hundreds of thousands of robots to Amazon warehouses around the world. For their invention, Pete and his co-founders were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. In 2016 Pete joined Cogitai, an AI startup that was acquired by Sony in 2019. Pete is now Director of Sony AI America and leads the Game AI project team that developed GT Sophy, an AI agent that defeated the top drivers in the world at the game Gran Turismo. Pete has over 50 academic papers and 60 patents, and is a AAAI and IEEE Fellow.
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