Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Rohit Prasad, the former Amazon executive who helped build Alexa and led some of the company’s biggest artificial intelligence projects, has taken charge as the new CEO of Boston Dynamics. Prasad joins the robotics company at a time when it is trying to bring more advanced AI into robots designed to work in the real world.
Boston Dynamics announced that Prasad’s appointment is effective October 7. He succeeds Robert Playter, who stepped down as CEO in February after six years in the role. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.
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For Boston Dynamics, the appointment brings an executive whose career has largely been built around AI rather than robotics hardware. His new job will involve combining the company’s robotics technology with AI to make its machines more capable, autonomous and useful in commercial and industrial settings.
Who is Rohit Prasad?
Prasad is an Indian-origin AI executive who grew up in Ranchi, Jharkhand. His interest in artificial intelligence and computers reportedly started at a young age. As a teenager, he was fascinated by Star Trek and its idea of computers communicating with humans. That early interest eventually turned into a career spanning machine learning, speech recognition, conversational AI and foundation models.
Before joining Boston Dynamics, Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon. He was a senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence. During his time with the company, he played an important role in taking Alexa from its early development into a consumer AI service used in hundreds of millions of households.
Prasad later led the development of Amazon Nova, the company’s family of foundation models designed for enterprise use. His experience has therefore covered both the research side of AI and the difficult process of turning that technology into products used at large scale.
From Raytheon to Amazon
Amazon was not Prasad’s first major technology job. Before joining the company, he spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he worked on machine-learning research and its applications for government and commercial customers. This means his career has moved through several stages of AI development – from research and speech recognition to consumer assistants and large AI models.
His experience at Amazon also included working on conversational AI. He was among the researchers associated with the development of Alexa and Amazon’s efforts to improve how people interact with computers using speech.
Where did he study?
Prasad completed his undergraduate engineering studies at BIT Mesra in Ranchi, the institute formally known as Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. He later pursued advanced studies in electrical engineering and computer science in the US.
His educational background in engineering and computer science laid the foundation for a career that eventually took him into machine learning, speech technology and artificial intelligence.
Why Boston Dynamics hired him
Prasad’s arrival comes as Boston Dynamics is pushing deeper into what it calls “Physical AI” – AI systems that can understand and act in the physical world. The company develops robots including Spot, its four-legged robot used for industrial inspections, Stretch for logistics and box handling, and Atlas, its humanoid robot platform. Boston Dynamics says Prasad will focus on turning advances in AI and robotics into products that can be deployed at scale.
The timing is important for Boston Dynamics’ parent company Hyundai Motor Group as well. Hyundai plans to deploy Atlas robots at its manufacturing operations, with the first deployments planned for 2028.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
