Early Career Spoltight Talks

The following early career spotlight speakers have been invited to present their work at the 2012 Robotics: Science and Systems conference. Details of the talks will be available here shortly.

Jan Peters Robot Learning Group Technische Universitaet Darmstadt Talk title: Towards Motor Skill Learning for Robotics Jan Peters is a full professor at the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) heading the interdepartmental robot learning group. Until 2011, he was was senior research scientist at the Dept. for Empirical Inference and Machine Learning of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-KYB) in Tuebingen, Germany. He graduated from University of Southern California (USC) with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He has completed masters degrees in Electrical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing./TU Muenchen), Informatics (Dipl-Inform./FernUni Hagen), Computer Science (M.Sc./USC) and Mechanical Engineering (M.Sc./USC). Jan Peters has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Robotics at the German Aerospace Research Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, at Siemens Advanced Engineering (SAE) in Singapore, at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and at the Department of Humanoid Robotics and Computational Neuroscience at the Advanded Telecommunication Research (ATR) Center in Kyoto, Japan. His research interests include robotics, nonlinear control, machine learning, reinforcement learning, and motor skill learning.
Cyrill Stachniss Dept. of Computer Science University of Freiburg Talk title: Towards Lifelong Navigation for Mobile Robots Cyrill Stachniss is a lecturer at the University of Freiburg in Germany. In 2009, he received his habilitation and venia legendi and also served as a guest lecturer at the University of Zaragoza. Before, he was a postdoc at Freiburg University and a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in the Autonomous Systems Lab of Roland Siegwart. In 2006, he finished his PhD thesis entitled "Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots", supervised by Wolfram Burgard, at the University of Freiburg. Since 2008, he is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and since 2010 a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow. In his research, he focuses on probabilistic techniques in the context of mobile robotics, perception, and navigation problems.
Charlie Kemp Wallace H. Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Talk title: Mobile Manipulation for Healthcare Charlie Kemp is a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. His research focuses on healthcare robotics with an emphasis on autonomous robot manipulation and human-robot interaction. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and a member of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech (RIM@GT), GVU, and the Health Systems Institute, which houses his lab.