Ex-magician roboticist Duan Jiafei wins multimillion-dollar grant to build Singapore's embodied AI dataset
DJiafei · x · 2026-10-22
Duan Jiafei, the Singaporean roboticist who led MolmoAct2 (a fully open robot foundation model), joined NUS Computing in July 2026 as a Presidential Young Professor, leading robot-learning research at MAGIC Lab — named after his sleight-of-hand magic hobby. He secured a multimillion-dollar grant under Singapore's National Robotics Programme to build a Singapore dataset and benchmark for embodied AI: the dataset gathers robot data from real-world tasks, while the benchmark gives researchers a standard test for comparing robot performance. The project is supported by Prof Liu Bin's team and collaborates with Prof Benjamin Tee's team at NUSX.
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