Byron Boots

Byron Boots is an American professor of machine learning and robotics. He is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington (UW). Boots is also the co-founder and chief executive officer of Overland AI, a technology startup.

Career Boots received his Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University under the advisory of Geoffrey J. Gordon. He later became an assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.

He is currently the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington. He was also a principal research scientist in the Seattle Robotics Lab at NVIDIA Research and co-chair of the Technical Committee on Robot Learning for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

In 2022, Boots co-founded the technology startup Overland AI to develop off-road autonomous vehicles. In 2024, the U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) jointly awarded the startup a $18.6 million contract to develop autonomy software for the Army's Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program.

Boots has received several awards for his work on robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. They include the NSF CAREER award in 2018, the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Early Career Award in 2020, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2022.