When not teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, CJ Taylor is part of the Robotics team working on The Institute for Learning-Enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS) at UC San Diego’s Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. He talks with Saura Naderi about his upbringing, his early interest in data science, and his current role within TILOS where he develops algorithms to make robots and computers smarter and more able to navigate the world. He also talks about his involvement in projects that benefit the community.