Invited Talks

We are proud to announce the following invited talks at the 2012 Robotics: Science and Systems conference. Details of the talks will be available here shortly.

Anders Sandberg James Martin Research Fellow Future of Humanity Institute University of Oxford Talk title: The robot and the philosopher: charting progress at the Turing centenary Anders Sandberg has a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University. He is currently James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. His research at FHI centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies, as well as issues surrounding global catastrophic risks. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, artificial intelligence, neuroethics, rationality, robust reasoning, and public policy. He is also an associate of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, as well as co-founder of the Swedish think-tank Eudoxa.
Mandyam Srinivasan Professor of Visual Neuroscience Queensland Brain Institute and School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering The University of Queensland Talk title: Small Brains, Small Planes Srinivasan is presently Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland. He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, a Master<92>s degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, a D.Sc. in Neuroethology from the Australian National University, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Zurich. Among his awards and honours are Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of London, and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, an Inaugural Federation Fellowship, the 2006 Australia Prime Minister<92>s Science Prize, the 2008 U.K. Rank Prize for Optoelectronics, and the 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award of the Indian Institute of Science.
Michelle Simmons Professor of Physics, Federation Fellow Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology University of New South Wales Talk title: Single Atom Devices for Quantum Computing Professor Simmons is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, a Federation Fellow and a Scientia Professor of Physics at the University of New South Wales. Following her PhD in solar engineering at the University of Durham in the UK she became a Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, working with Professor Sir Michael Pepper FRS in quantum electronics. In 1999, she was awarded a QEII Fellowship and came to Australia where she was a founding member, and now the Director of the Centre of Excellence. Since 2000 she has established a large research group dedicated to the fabrication of atomic-scale devices in silicon using the atomic precision of a scanning tunneling microscopy. Her group has developed the world<92>s thinnest conducting wires in silicon and the smallest transistors made with atomic precision. She has published more than 300 papers in refereed journals and presented over 80 invited and plenary presentations at international conferences. In 2005 she was awarded the Pawsey Medal by the Australian Academy of Science and in 2006 became the one of the youngest elected Fellows of this Academy. In 2008 she was awarded a second Federation Fellowship by the Australian Government and was named the NSW Scientist of the Year in 2011.
Zoubin Ghahramani Professor of Information Engineering Department of Engineering University of Cambridge Talk title: Machine Learning as Probabilistic Modeling Zoubin Ghahramani is a Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He studied computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, obtained his PhD from MIT in 1995, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. His academic career includes concurrent appointments as one of the founding members of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London, and as a faculty member of CMU's Machine Learning Department for over 10 years. His current research focuses on nonparametric Bayesian modelling and statistical machine learning. He has also worked on applications to bioinformatics, econometrics, and a variety of large-scale data modelling problems. He has over 200 publications in fields such as computer science, statistics, engineering, and neuroscience. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading journals in the field, including JMLR, JAIR, Annals of Statistics, Machine Learning, Bayesian Analysis, and was Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, the IEEE's highest impact journal. He also served on the Board of the International Machine Learning Society, and as Program Chair (2007) and General Chair (2011) of the International Conference on Machine Learning and will be Program Chair of NIPS (2013). More information can be found at http://learning.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/.
Andrew Howard Senior Guidance, Navigation and Control Engineer SpaceX Talk title: Enter the Dragon: The SpaceX COTS Missions Dr. Howard is Senior Guidance, Navigation and Control Engineer at Space Exploration Technologies and designer of the DragonEye proximity navigation system. Previously, he was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on vision-based navigation for a wide variety of projects, including Boston Dynamics' BigDog and the DARPA Crusher UGCV. Prior to joining JPL, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California Robotics Research Laboratory. Dr. Howard is a graduate of the University of Melbourne, with a degree in theoretical physics and PhD in computer science.