Keynotes

Reid Simmons

Carnegie Mellon University

Reid Simmons is a Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, currently on leave as a Program Director at NSF.  He received the PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1988 and has been at Carnegie Mellon since.  His research focuses on autonomous, collaborative robots, and includes research in human-robot social interaction, multi-robot coordination for assembly, robust autonomy, probabilistic planning and reasoning, and robot control architectures.  Dr. Simmons has published over 200 papers on these subjects and has helped develop over a dozen autonomous robots.

Wendy Ju

Stanford University

Dr. Wendy Ju is Executive Director for Interaction Design Research at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, and Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the Design MFA program at California College of the Arts. Her work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. She has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions is available from Morgan & Claypool.

Alan Schultz

Naval Research Laboratory

Alan C. Schultz is Director of the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington D.C., in addition to being selected as the first Director of NRL’s new Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research.  He has 30 years of experience and over 140 publications in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, robotics, human-robot interaction, and machine learning, and is responsible for establishing and running the robotics laboratory at NRL.  Mr. Schultz was selected to teach at the first IEEE/RAS Summer School on Human-Robot Interaction, has been editor of several collections in multi-robot systems, and has chaired many conferences and workshops in robotics and human-robot interaction. Mr. Schultz received his M.S. in Computer Science from George Mason University in 1988. Mr. Schultz has been P.I. on numerous ONR, OSD, DARPA, NASA and DOE grants.  He is the recipient of over twenty Navy Special Achievement awards for significant contributions, and the Alan Berman Research Publication Award. His research is in the areas of human-robot interaction, autonomous systems, and adaptive systems.

Bill Smart

Oregon State University

Bill Smart is an associate professor at Oregon State University, where he co-directs the Robotics Program.  He holds a PhD and ScM in Computer Science from Brown University, an MSc in Intelligent Robotics from the University of Edinburgh, and a BSc (hons) in Computer Science from the University of Dundee, and has been working with robots for over 25 years. His current research interests lie in the areas of human-robot interaction, reinforcement learning for robot control, assistive robotics, long term autonomy, software for robotics, and the intersection of law, policy, and robotics.  Smart co-founded the ICRA Robot Challenge (with Paul Rybski), and is a strong proponent of building whole robot systems, and testing them in the real world.  He is unreasonably proud of his Erdós-Bacon number, which is 6.

Charles Isbell

Georgia Institute of Technology

Charles Isbell is a Professor and Senior Associate Dean at Georgia Tech's College of Computing. His research interests are varied, but he mostly spends his time building autonomous agents that engage in life-long learning in the presence of thousands of other intelligent agents, including humans. His work has been featured in the popular media, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as in technical collections, where he has won two best paper awards in this area. Charles also pursues reform in CS education. He was a developer of Threads, Georgia Tech's structuring principle for computing curricula, as well as the new online MS in CS. He was recently named one of the top 16 innovators in higher education by Washington Monthly.

Michael Littman

Brown University

Michael L. Littman's research in machine learning examines algorithms for decision making under uncertainty.  He has earned multiple awards for teaching and his research has been recognized with three best-paper awards and two influential paper awards.  Littman has served on the editorial boards for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.  He was general chair of International Conference on Machine Learning 2013 and program chair of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference 2013. He is also a AAAI Fellow.

Carla Diana

University of Pennsylvania

Carla Diana is a designer, author and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. In her studio she works on future-specting projects in areas such as domestic robots, mobile devices and sentient kitchen appliances, combining experience in industrial and interaction design to create solutions that bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. Her seminal article, “Talking, Walking Objects”, which appeared on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review, is a good representation of her view of our robotic future.

Carla writes and lectures extensively on the subject of creative technology. She has taught at several universities, including a year as visiting faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was creative director for the iconic humanoid robot, Simon. Currently, she is a Lecturer in the Integrated Product Design program at the University of Pennsylvania where she created the first courses focused on the design and analysis of smart objects.

Her background combines an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art with a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Cooper Union.