Pete Florence
Co-Founder & CEO at Generalist
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPete Florence is a robotics and computer vision specialist, entrepreneur, and researcher with 11 years of experience bridging cutting-edge AI research and product leadership. Currently Co-Founder & CEO at Generalist after roles as Staff and Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, he has led work spanning large multimodal language models, robotic manipulation, 3D and self-supervised learning. His PhD from MIT’s Robot Locomotion Group and contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Drake and Dense Object Nets underline deep systems and hands-on implementation expertise. Pete’s GitHub work shows a focus on practical ML engineering—improving dataset tooling, visualization, and domain randomization for robot perception—while his documentation edits to underactuated reflect care for reproducible teaching materials. Based in San Francisco, he combines academic rigor with startup pragmatism and a track record of shipping research into production-facing systems.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMaster of Philosophy (MPhil) Physics, Master of Philosophy (MPhil) Physics at University of CambridgeSaratoga High SchoolA.B. Chemistry, A.B. Chemistry at Princeton University
Stackoverflow
4,812reputation
252kreached
1answer
1question
html
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webkit
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ios
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Github Skills (18)
pytorch10
robotics10
ios10
python10
machine-learning10
matlab10
webkit10
data-preprocessing10
drake10
html10
computer-vision10
documentation10
data-augmentation9
urdf8
autoplay6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/pytorch-dense-correspondence
Feb 2018 - Nov 2019
Code for "Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation"
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:606 commits, 20 PRs, 48 pushes in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Pete primarily focused on developing and refining the `LabelFusionDataset` class, a crucial component for loading and preprocessing data from the LabelFusion dataset. Their contributions included implementing and fixing functionality within the dataset class, such as addressing issues with data augmentation and incorporating both the original image and the corresponding mask for training and evaluation. The user also implemented a domain randomization function and worked on integrating tools for plotting and visualizing correspondences, demonstrating an effort to enhance the data processing and analysis pipeline within the context of the PyTorch-based deep learning project.
manipulationroboticsvisionnetsrobotic-manipulation
RussTedrake/underactuated
Aug 2015 - Feb 2018
The course text for MIT 6.832 (and 6.832x on edX)
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:17 commits, 6 PRs, 3 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Pete primarily focused on improving the documentation of the `underactuated` repository, which serves as a course text. Their contributions included fixing typos and formatting issues within the HTML documentation. The user also updated the documentation to reflect the use of quotes within the HTML and adjusting the example file paths. These edits enhance the clarity and accuracy of the course materials.
edxpythonmit
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