Four new faculty members have joined the Robotics Institute over the past year – Stelian Coros, Keenan Crane, Stephen Nuske and Deva Ramanan. Faculty, staff and students are invited to welcome them at the first Post Seminar Reception (PSR) of the semester at 4:45 p.m. Friday Sept. 18 in NSH 1513.
Coros, an assistant professor of robotics, earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of British Columbia and previously was a research scientist at Disney Research Zurich. His research focuses on motor control, motion planning algorithms, physics-based simulation tools and computational design methods for mechanical structures with controllable material properties. His goal is to enable the general public, with the aid of 3-D printing, to create physical devices to improve their own lives, such as robots that help with kitchen tasks, housekeeping and gardening; devices to assist people with disabilities, and even lovable characters for entertainment.
Crane, an assistant professor of computer science and robotics, earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Caltech and previously had an NSF Mathematical Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Columbia University’s Department of Computer Science. His research leverages insights from differential geometry and computer science to develop fundamental algorithms for working with real-world geometric data – in other words, helping computers think more clearly about shapes.
Nuske is no stranger to the Robotics Institute, having joined the institute as a post-doctoral fellow in 2008; he subsequently became a project scientist and a senior project scientist and now has been appointed as a systems scientist. His research interest is the design of computer vision systems practical for the harsh conditions of field robotic applications. He has worked on such projects as autonomous vineyard and orchard yield estimation, automated detection of landing sites for helicopters and mapping riverine environments with low-flying rotorcraft. He earned his Ph.D. at the CSIRO Autonomous Systems Lab and the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Ramanan, an associate professor of robotics, previously was an associate professor of computer science at the University of California-Irvine. His research interests span computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on visual recognition. His academic honors include the 2009 David Marr Prize, the 2010 PASCAL VOC Lifetime Achievement Prize and a 2010 NSF CAREER Award. In 2012, Popular Science selected him as one of its Brilliant 10 researchers.