Nicky Penkov

Global People Director, Dotdigital
London, England,United Kingdom
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Who Is Nicky Penkov?

Total Experience25 years
CompanyDotdigital
CountryUnited Kingdom

Nicky Penkov is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, focusing on robotics and artificial intelligence. His research is centered on developing robots that can learn complex manipulation skills and generalize these skills across a wide variety of tasks, objects, and environments. He is particularly interested in imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and the creation of large-scale, general-purpose robotics models (often referred to as foundation models for robotics). Nicky aims to bridge the gap between the vast knowledge available on the internet and the physical capabilities of robots, enabling them to understand and interact with the world in more human-like ways. He completed his PhD in Robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining Google.

How Did Nicky Penkov's Career Path Shape Their Journey?

Nicky Penkov's work history includes a series of influential roles in various companies. Here is a detailed list of his professional journey:

Dotdigital - Global People Director(2011 to Present)
Tamar - Talent and Operations Director(2008 to 2011)
Tamar.com - Head of Operations, SA(2007 to 2008)
Codix.net - Senior Developer(2000 to 2003)

What Are Nicky Penkov's Key Achievements?

Key Contributor to RT-2 (Robotics Transformer 2)

Played a significant role in the development of RT-2, a novel vision-language-action (VLA) model at Google DeepMind. RT-2 co-fine-tunes large language models with robotic data, allowing it to transfer conceptual understanding and reasoning from web data to robot control, demonstrating emergent capabilities and improved generalization in robotics.

Development of RT-1 (Robotics Transformer 1)

Led and contributed to the creation of RT-1, a multi-task, multi-embodiment transformer-based model for real-world robotic control. RT-1 demonstrated the ability to learn from large, diverse datasets of robot experiences and generalize to new tasks and situations effectively.

Advancements in Robot Learning and Generalization

His research has consistently pushed the boundaries of how robots can learn and generalize skills, focusing on techniques that allow robots to perform a wide array of manipulation tasks without needing to be retrained for every new scenario. This includes work on data-driven approaches and scaling robot learning.

PhD in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology

Earned a PhD with a dissertation focused on scalable and data-efficient deep reinforcement learning for robotic control, laying groundwork for his later contributions to large-scale robot learning.

What's Nicky Penkov's Educational Background?

MCIPD

CIPD Qualifications

MSc, Information Technology

Kingston University

BSc, Oceanography with Marine Biology

University of Southampton

High School

Putney High School

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Notable news
Hiring actively
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Company Overview

Dotdigital
Total employees667
HeadquartersLondon
Founded1999

Dotdigital is a customer engagement platform that empowers marketers to connect customer data, surface powerful insights, and automate intelligent messages across email, SMS, social media, and more. It helps businesses to acquire, convert, and retain customers through personalized and automated cross-channel communications, ultimately aiming to enhance customer loyalty and drive revenue.

Dotdigital Stock Information
Dotdigital, Inc. is listed on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) under the ticker symbol DOTD. The company went public on April 1, 2011

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