Carnegie Mellon University

Yonatan Bisk

Yonatan Bisk

Assistant Professor, Language Technologies Institute

  • 6703 Gates & Hillman Centers
Yonatan Bisk is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI) and Robotics Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of natural language processing (NLP), robotics, and embodied AI, with an emphasis on enabling machines to interpret and act upon language in the context of physical and social environments. Dr. Bisk's work advances theory of mind and embodied language systems, exploring how language interacts with vision, action, and reasoning. 

Dr. Bisk earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focusing on unsupervised grammar induction, and held postdoctoral positions at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, the University of Washington, and the Allen Institute for AI. He has worked as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research and Meta AI. At CMU he founded the REAL Center (Robotics, Embodied AI, and Learning), which aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration across the university in Robot Learning and AI/ML.

At CMU, Dr. Bisk teaches courses such as  "Talking to Robots," and "Multimodal Machine Learning," and "On-Device Machine Learning." He is actively involved in service to the research community, including roles as an (senior) area chair or editor across the NLP, Robotics, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision communities. Through his teaching, research, and outreach, Dr. Bisk is helping to shape the future of embodied AI and its applications in understanding and interacting with the world.
  • Embodied AI
  • Language Grounding
  • Language Conditioned Robotics
  • Linguistic Divination