About
I grew up in San Francisco and have spent the rest of my life in France and Switzerland. I love working on interdisciplinary problems. Most of my work takes place at the intersection of theory and implementation.
I compulsively obsess over the long arc of the future. A hundred years from now, I see humanity among the stars having explored beyond Earth and thriving across the solar system. I believe aligned AI will be the key driver of breakthroughs in biology, medicine, materials science, and robotics, and that energy abundance, unlocked by nuclear fusion and solar power in space, will be the foundation for all of it.
Work and research
Microsoft Research, Student Researcher
2026 to present
Representations and latent action alignment with world action models for robot manipulation in Prof. Marc Pollefeys' Spatial AI Lab.
World and video-action models for humanoid control
2026 to present
Video-action models for the Unitree G1 on bimanual data: NVIDIA Cosmos 2.5 paired with an inverse dynamics model, and a Cosmos 3 variant that jointly predicts video and actions in the SONIC action space.
ETH Robotics Club, Humanoid Software Lead
2024 to 2026
Led robot learning, controls and software development for the club's mark 1 humanoid. Also worked with G1s a lot: VLA fine-tuning and deployment (NVIDIA GR00T), whole-body control (SONIC), VR teleoperation and data collection.
EPFL Machine Learning and Optimization Lab, Research
2022
Research on semantic uncertainty to improve LLM decoding for reasoning tasks under Prof. Martin Jäggi. [paper]
DeFi, smart contracts and infrastructure
2023 to 2024
Built and contributed to multiple high-performance onchain financial protocols on Ethereum, Sui and Solana, including DeepBook, Gelato and Suilend.
Founderful, Student VC Partner
2023
Sourced and led a pre-seed deal for Stacksync (YC F23) at Switzerland's largest pre-seed fund, targeting EPFL and ETH Zurich.
Honey Labs, Co-founder
2020 to 2022
Built one of the first and largest cross-chain money markets on Solana and Ethereum. Seed-funded, acquired 2023.
University of Bern, Astrophysics
2019
Placed 2nd in the Swiss National Science and Youth Competition. Published on gravitational lensing and dark matter distribution in the Milky Way.
Writing
Reading list
- How to do great work, Paul Graham
- The decade ahead, Leopold Aschenbrenner
- The ethos of the divine age, Pirate Wires
- Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster
- Hackers and painters, Paul Graham
Culture
I like water sports mostly. Kitesurfing, diving and swimming. Here are some artists I enjoy listening to:
- Black Sabbath
- Led Zeppelin
- The Doors
- The Beatles
- The Rolling Stones
- Jimi Hendrix
- AC/DC
Contact
Academic: dfoodeei@ethz.ch
Everything else: darius.foodei@gmail.com