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Spring 2026 GRASP SFI: Ji Woong (Brian) Kim, Stanford University, “Generalist Robots for Healthcare: From Surgical Robots to Humanoids”
April 1 at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. This week’s speaker will be presenting virtually.
ABSTRACT
Access to timely, high-quality medical care is a global challenge due to workforce shortages. In this talk, I will discuss how we can address this bottleneck through two emerging frontiers: autonomous surgical robots and general-purpose humanoids. I will first present our work on Hierarchical Surgical Robot Transformer, the first end-to-end autonomous system to perform long-horizon surgical steps on animal tissues. I will also discuss Open-H, a collaborative effort across 30+ institutions to scale surgical data to build foundation robot models and world models. Moving beyond the operating room, I will discuss my research in humanoids, focusing on how we can leverage human data to teach robots tasks unseen in robot datasets through cross-domain transfer. I will conclude by discussing open problems and technical limitations towards realizing a future of fully automated, 24/7 healthcare.
Ji Woong (Brian) Kim
Stanford University
Brian Kim is a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science at Stanford University, advised by Chelsea Finn. His research focuses on scaling robotic intelligence from specialized surgical tasks to general-purpose humanoid applications. Brian’s work on autonomous laparoscopic surgery was featured on the July 2025 cover of Science Robotics and has been covered by numerous media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Reuters. He received his Ph.D. and B.S. at Johns Hopkins University.