George Konidaris Has Been Promoted To Full Professor
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on May 18, 2026
Brown CS is happy to announce that with the anticipated approval of Brown University’s Corporation and effective as of July 1, 2026, George Konidaris has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor.
George joined the Brown CS faculty in 2016 from Duke, where he taught for two years after completing postdoctoral research at MIT. He holds a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (with distinction) from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, and a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Computer Science (with distinction) from the University of the Witwatersrand.
George directs the Intelligent Robot Lab (IRL), which is part of the Brown Integrative, General AI (bigAI) group. His research is driven by the overarching scientific goal of understanding the fundamental computational processes that generate intelligence and using them to design a generally-intelligent robot. IRL conducts interdisciplinary research spanning robotics, reinforcement learning, machine learning, task and motion planning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence.
George’s latest research includes “Task and Skill Planning: Hierarchical Robot Planning with Black-Box Skills”, “NovaFlow: Zero-Shot Manipulation via Actionable Flow from Generated Videos”, and “One-Shot Cross-Geometry Skill Transfer through Part Decomposition”. His teaching has included CSCI 1952-D Intelligent Robotics, CSCI 2951-X Reintegrating AI, and CSCI 1410 Artificial Intelligence.
Most recently, George has given a keynote address at the Fifth Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents as well as invited talks at the Fourth Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents, two RLC 2025 Workshops (Finding the Frame and Reinforcement Learning Beyond Rewards: Ingredients for Developing Generalist Agents), and the AAAI 2025 Workshop in Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning. His latest service to the scientific community includes serving as Action Editor of The Journal of Machine Learning Research and The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Local Co-Chair of The Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making.
George’s recent accolades include a Best Paper Award from the CoRL 2025 Workshop on Representing and Interacting with Non-Rigid Objects, an Amazon Research Award, the IROS 2021 Best RoboCup Paper Award, and Brown University’s Karen T. Romer Prize for Undergraduate Advising and Mentoring. He is the co-founder of Lelapa AI, which builds language technology for African languages, and Realtime Robotics, a Boston-based robotics company.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
