Aditya Agrawal
I study computer science and mathematics at UC Irvine, where I also do funded research on world models and model-based reinforcement learning, mostly pointed at robots.
As a kid I thought that whatever I dreamed up, I'd have to build out of something I could hold. Computers don't work like that: what they make has no substance at all, and yet it runs; it steers a rover, reads a pose from a photo, tells a bottle from a banana peel. They let you materialize and share something you've only imagined, provided you have the vocabulary to describe it and the grit to see it through. That's close enough to magic for me, and it's still the reason I build. These days I'm trying to teach a robot to imagine, too.