Arthur Wandzel is co-founder and chief executive of SF AI Labs, a San Francisco, California, AI consultancy. The firm describes him as an AI entrepreneur and researcher with more than ten years across MIT-affiliated research and venture-backed startups (SF AI Labs).
Teaching robots to find things
Wandzel’s best-documented research came out of Stefanie Tellex’s robotics lab at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was lead author of “Multi-Object Search using Object-Oriented POMDPs,” presented at the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), which showed how a robot could search for several objects at once and take spoken hints about where to look (paper).
The work led to US patent 11,897,140, “Systems and methods for operating robots using object-oriented Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes,” with Wandzel and Tellex as inventors and Brown University as assignee. It was granted on February 13, 2024 (Google Patents).
From research to a consultancy
SF AI Labs says it was founded by AI researchers and venture-backed founders, and its pitch leans on that background: translating first-principles research into working products. Wandzel runs the company with co-founder and CTO Dirk Jan van Veen, who holds a PhD from ETH Zurich and works on multi-agent systems. Our SF AI Labs review covers the firm’s cases and pricing.