Tara Javidi

Prof. Tara Javidi is a researcher and entrepreneur at the intersection of information theory and physical AI. An IEEE Fellow and Lewak Endowed Chair Professor at UC San Diego, she is also CTO & Chief Scientist of KavAI — bringing two decades of foundational research directly into industrial deployment. Her academic work established the theory of active learning and sensing: how intelligent systems should decide what to observe next, rather than passively waiting for data. That work has already translated across industries — shaping adaptive wireless systems in telecom, acquisition strategies in medical imaging, and federated learning — and her students number among the most well-funded and influential innovators in Silicon Valley. At UC San Diego she co-directs MICS, where AMD, AWS, DARPA, Northrop Grumman, and Qualcomm engage with frontier AI research, and serves as Co-PI of TILOS, a $20M NSF National AI Research Institute. She has 19,400+ citations and served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE JSAIT. At KavAI, she is translating that same body of work into Active Physical Intelligence — curiosity-driven, multimodal sensing systems now deployed in live industrial environments.