CIFellow, Alexis E. Block began her CIFellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles in September 2021. Block is mentored by Veronica J. Santos, Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Laboratory, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the school’s Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Faculty Affairs. Prior to beginning her CIFellowship, she received her Dr. sc. from ETH Zurich where she was a part of a joint program called the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems. Block recently won the Otto Hahn Medal from Germany’s Max Planck Society for her dissertation work in human-robot interaction and the development of the “HuggieBot” which you can read about here. […]

Imagine diagnosing a hospital patient with septicemia 25 hours before the onset of sepsis shock, dispatching the right police officer to de-escalate a situation, or increasing agricultural productivity based on weather knowledge where few weather stations exist. These scenarios are not simply dreams, but thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) research are actually happening in the world today and are having a positive impact on societies across the globe. Interest in artificial intelligence has been rapidly increasing in recent years, often with a focus on the flashy robot or computer that can speak responses, but the practical applications have a major societal impact and are often overlooked. AI has been successfully applied to societal […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 2:00pm EDT by Dr. Daniela Rus titled Pervasive Robots. Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She is also a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computer […]

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 […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from John Oberlin, Maria Meier, Tim Kraska, and Stefanie Tellex in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Their Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Baxter is a two armed manipulator robot which which is gaining popularity in the research and industrial communities. At […]

  The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbeel in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at the University of California Berkeley. Their End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Techniques like reinforcement learning and optimal control offer the promise of automating robotic decision making by using […]