PhD Thesis Proposal
Nathan Otten
Carnegie Mellon University

Rover Traverse Planning for Prolonged Solar-Powered Polar Exploration

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Future in-situ resource utilization promises to enable affordable exploration of space and extend human presence in the Solar System by minimizing the materials that must be carried from Earth. This is predicated on the existence of economic quantities of native materials that can be converted into consumable resources, such as water, [...]

RI Seminar
Matthew Johnson-Roberson
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan

Underwater mapping: new robotic approaches to an old problem

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Matthew Johnson-Roberson is Assistant Professor of Engineering in the Department of Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received a PhD from the University of Sydney in 2010. There he worked on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for long-term environment [...]

RI Seminar
Sabine Hauert
Lecturer in Robotics
University of Bristol, UK

Swarming nanobots for cancer applications

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: I am a swarm engineer interested in designing large collective systems that self-organize. Swarm strategies are either inspired from nature (ant colonies and bird flocks) or are automatically designed in simulation using machine learning and crowdsourcing. Demonstrated applications include designing swarming nanoparticles for cancer treatment and deploying large aerial swarms for [...]

VASC Seminar
Olga Russakovsky
Postdoctoral Fellow, RI
Carnegie Mellon

The human side of computer vision

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Olga Russakovsky (http://cs.cmu.edu/~orussako) is a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. She recently completed a PhD in computer science at Stanford advised by Prof. Fei-Fei Li. Her research is in computer vision, closely integrated with machine learning and human-computer interaction. She led the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge effort [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Siyuan Feng
Carnegie Mellon University

Online Hierarchical Optimization for Humanoid Control

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: This thesis presents an online approach for controlling humanoid robots using hierarchical optimization. While our primary focus is to develop a fast and robust walking controller that is able to follow desired foot steps, full body manipulation capability is also achieved. The proposed hierarchical system consists of three levels: a high [...]

RI Seminar
Adam Bry
CEO
Skydio

Algorithms and challenges in scaling up autonomous flight

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Adam Bry is co-founder and CEO of Skydio, a venture backed drone startup based in the bay area. Prior to Skydio he helped start Project Wing at Google[x] where he worked on the flight algorithms and software. He holds a SM in Aero/Astro from MIT and a BS in Mechanical Engineering [...]

VASC Seminar
Robert Pless
Professor
Washington University

Brighter, Faster, Cheaper: Finding or Creating Light Fields for Visual Computing

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Robert Pless is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he founded and directs the Media and Machines Lab. His research focus are big-data and geometric approaches to Visual Computing, with applications to social justice and environmental measurement. Dr. Pless has a Bachelors Degree [...]

RI Seminar
Thomas Howard
Assistant Professor
University of Rochester

Learning Models for Robot Decision Making

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Thomas Howard is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. He is also a member of the Institute for Data Science and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Previously he held appointments as a research scientist and [...]

VASC Seminar
Genevieve Patterson
Computer Vision PhD Student
Brown University

Collective Insight: Crowd-driven Image Understanding

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Genevieve is a PhD Candidate in Computer Vision at Brown University. Her work on crowd-driven visual classification was recently awarded runner-up for Best Paper at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation (HCOMP). She built and maintains the SUN Attribute dataset, a widely used resource for scene understanding. Genevieve received her master's [...]

RI Seminar
M. Ani Hsieh
Associate Professor
Drexel University

Exploiting the Environment to Improve Autonomy: Robots in Geophysical Flows

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: M. Ani Hsieh is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics Department at Drexel University. She received a B.S. in Engineering and B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College in 1999 and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. Her current work focuses on developing [...]