American Family Insurance, CSAIL Alliances Affiliate, exists to protect what matters most to households and businesses across the country, using data science and applied AI.
Add to calendarAmerica/New_YorkAI, Data Science & Careers from American Family Insurance10/15/2026
American Family Insurance, CSAIL Alliances Affiliate, exists to protect what matters most to households and businesses across the country, using data science and applied AI.
This talk introduces MIT graduate students to insurance as a serious technology, data, and AI problem, not just a financial product. Insurance AI rarely means one model: many specialized systems — for risk, fraud, compliance, and claims — each with its own evaluation, quality gates, and human review. The speaker leads several applied AI initiatives at American Family and has worked hands-on across this ecosystem. The talk draws on that complexity, and on pressures like catastrophe risk, climate, cybersecurity, and responsible AI deployment, to explain why insurance sits at the center of some of today's hardest technology problems. It highlights AmFam's academic research partnerships — on severe weather and wildfire risk — as one model for how graduate research translates into real-world impact, and closes with internship and career opportunities for graduate students.
Tesla, CSAIL Alliances members, develops and deploys autonomy at scale in vehicles, robots and more.
Tesla believes that an approach based on advanced AI for vision and planning, supported by efficient use of inference hardware, is the only way to achieve a general solution for full self-driving, bi-pedal robotics and beyond.
Add to calendarAmerica/New_YorkTraining Robust Optimus Policies: Tesla AI Tech Talk10/14/2026
Tesla, CSAIL Alliances members, develops and deploys autonomy at scale in vehicles, robots and more.
Tesla believes that an approach based on advanced AI for vision and planning, supported by efficient use of inference hardware, is the only way to achieve a general solution for full self-driving, bi-pedal robotics and beyond.
Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) drives millions of miles autonomously every day across hundreds of cities. This feat is only possible through training extremely robust policies. When the goal is to similarly have millions of robots doing thousands of useful tasks in a wide variety of environments, we need to ensure that Optimus has similarly robust policies. In this talk, we share some of our strategies in training such robust policies and showcase some of our latest world models that make this possible.
Building and scaling AI systems looks different once you leave the lab. Join us for a lunch with Dr. Patrick Butler from Nebius, to discuss the messy middle between “it works on my machine” and production-grade infrastructure at scale.
We’ll dig into what actually breaks (and what actually works) when moving from research prototypes to production workloads — GPU provisioning, scaling headaches, cost tradeoffs, and the lessons learned the hard way. Expect candid stories from people building at the frontier, good food, and even better conversation.
