Dr. Jiafei Duan is a Presidential Young Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Director of the MAGIC Lab (Manipulation and General Intelligence Control), and Research Scientist at A*STAR.
Formerly a researcher at UW and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), Jiafei co-led the open-source "MolmoAct" and "MolmoAct2" robotics foundation models; action reasoning models designed to provide a transparent, fully reproducible alternative to proprietary "black box" physical AI systems.
MAGIC Lab: https://magic-ailab.github.io/
RoboPapers Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@RoboPapers
Jiafei on X: https://x.com/DJiafei
Ilir on X: https://x.com/IlirAliu_
Ilir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilir-aliu/
Timestamps:
0:00 Why true robotics progress requires radically open science
1:45 The RoboPapers podcast: Asking the hard research questions
3:34 Building my first mobile manipulator from PVC pipes at 16
7:19 The Leap Motion epiphany: Controlling plywood with Arduino
10:15 Writing the survey that introduced "Embodied AI" to Singapore
14:55 Why Singapore is investing heavily in physical intelligence
21:36 Moving from cognitive science to robotics at UW with Dieter Fox
24:51 AR2-D2: Collecting robot manipulation data using AR & inpainting
28:41 The PhD shift: Learning how to think and communicate science
32:49 Why robotics isn't ready for industry to consolidate yet
39:11 Vision researchers are migrating to ICRA: The field is shifting
41:26 Running open VLA models on a $200 SO-100 hobbyist robot
46:38 Leaving Ai2: The philosophy behind fully open data and weights
50:52 Launching the MAGIC Lab at NUS: Finding efficient model architectures
54:36 Why robotics won't have its ChatGPT moment without open source
