Nope, guy is a fraud. He's listed as a research affiliate in MIT's directory at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (not their CS/AI oriented lab as he claims). Research affiliates aren't employees, and so he's never received a salary from MIT. He also isn't (and hasn't) ever taught any for-credit courses at MIT and his most cited paper was not peer-reviewed. To say he's a leading MIT researcher is a joke. At best he's a practitioner interested in applied ML/AI work as it relates to aeronatics/astronautics.

I'm been somewhat aware of the "leading work" in AI/ML circles for the past 5 years and I was banging my head against the table trying to figure out why I never heard of this guy.