Robohub has recently published its list of 25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About to highlight women who are making great contributions to modern robotics. Some highlights from the list include: Nancy Amato, a professor at Texas A&M and on the CRA’s Board of Directors. Amato is noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing, as well as her leadership in broadening participation in the industry. Her 1998 paper on probabilistic roadmap methods is one of the most important papers on this field. Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor at Stanford University and Director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab […]

Last week we published a blog post highlighting the MIT Technology Review’s 2015 list of 35 innovators under the age of 35. This list included Travis Deyle who was a member of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) CI Fellow program in 2011 and currently works at Google X Life Sciences where he has been part of a team that developed glucose-sensing and autofocusing contact lenses. Travis earned a PhD in healthcare robotics from Georgia Tech in 2011, where he built some of the first mobile robots capable operating in real homes. These robots could be used for tasks such as robot-mediated medication delivery fetching and retrieving tagged objects, and helping […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Gregory Hager (Johns Hopkins University). Imagine you have to change the IV on a writhing patient while wearing two layers of protective gear, the temperature is nearly 100 degrees, the humidity is 100 percent, and you’ve been in your suit for nearly an hour. That is the daily struggle for healthcare workers across Western Africa treating Ebola patients. Can we somehow use our technologies, either those existing today or envisioned for the near future, to change the course of this daily battle and, by doing so, have an impact that could potentially save the lives of […]

Rescue Robots at the Cologne Germany Building Collapse I finished The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston just before the City Archives collapsed in Cologne, Germany, on March 3. I soon found myself at my 11th disaster, but unlike Webb, the protagonist who must come to grips with the events that led him to a janitorial job cleaning up trauma sites, I was clear on why I was there standing in the rain. I was there in the hope that we could make a difference with technology — that we could enable the fire rescue teams to save a life, prevent a responder’s death, or […]