Peter Haas

Peter Haas is the CEO at VAIRC. Formerly the Director of the Department of Robotics at MassTech, where he was responsible for building out the MA robotics ecosystem -- one of the largest clusters of robotics companies in the United States -- he was also the CEO of Avendly a bar and restaurant robotics company.

Haas was formerly the Associate Director of the Brown University Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative where he helped in research on automation-based job displacement, AR, VR and MR interfaces for robots, MR shared mental models with robots, social robotics for the elderly, UAV autonomy, Moral norms in AI, and some peripheral pick and place and motion planning work. He was also faculty in the Brown University school of engineering.

He ran the Computer Vision practice at IDC as Research Director in Computer Vision AI Software. He was the Co-Founder and COO of XactSense, a UAV manufacturer working on LIDAR mapping and autonomous navigation. Prior to XactSense, Haas founded AIDG – a small hardware enterprise accelerator in Haiti and Guatemala. AIDG did design for extreme affordability work and provided seed funding to local entrepreneurs.

Haas received both TED and Echoing Green fellowships. He has been a speaker at TED Global, The World Bank, DHL Robotics Days, The Economist World Gala, Harvard University and other venues. He speaks on AI, Robotics, automation-based job displacement, design for extreme affordability, disaster response and international development. He holds a Philosophy BA from Yale.