Invited Speakers

Nancy Amato Texas A&M University	Nancy M. Amato is Unocal Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University where she co-directs the Parasol Lab. Her main areas of research focus are motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed computing. She has graduated 16 PhD students, with most of them going on to careers in academia (7) and government or industry research labs (5), 25 master's students, and has worked with more than 100 undergraduate researchers and 10 high school students, with the majority being students from groups underrepresented in computing. She currently supervises 15 PhD students, 3 masters students, and more than 10 undergraduate and high school researchers.

Antonio Bicchi University of Pisa	Antonio Bicchi is Professor of Robotics at the University of Pisa, and Senior Scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. He graduated from the University of Bologna in 1988 and was a postdoc scholar at M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence lab in 1988–1990. He teaches Control Systems and Robotics in the Department of Information Engineering (DII) of the University of Pisa, leads the Robotics group at the Research Center "E. Piaggio'' of the University of Pisa since 1990, and served as Director from 2003 to 2012. He is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering of Arizona State University since 2013.

Maria Gini University of Minnisota	Professor. Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science. College of Science and Engineering Distinguished Professor. Member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, University of Minnesota, 1998-. Winner of the Inaugural Distinguished Women Scholars Award, University of Minnesota, 2001. AAAI Fellow. ACM Distinguished Scientist. Areas of interest: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Intelligent Agents.

A.J. Brush Microsoft Research	A.J. Bernheim Brush is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, USA and member of the Computational User Experiences (CUE) group. A.J. graduated Summa cum Laude from Williams College and earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Washington. A.J.’s research area is Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on Ubiquitous Computing and Computer Supported Collaboration (CSCW). A.J. is best known for her research on technologies for families and her expertise conducting field studies of technology. She currently focuses on Contextual Computing, using sensing, inference, and prediction to enable new experiences in the home and on mobile devices. A.J. publishes frequently at the top conferences in her research areas and she holds 5 patents. She was honored to receive a Borg Early Career Award in 2010. A.J. serves on the UbiComp-Pervasive Conference Steering Committee and the CRA-W board. She served as ACM SIGCHI VP for Membership and Communications from 2006 – 2009 and as the program co-chair for the Pervasive 2009 conference. A.J. has also served on Program Committees for many conferences including UbiComp, Pervasive, CHI, and CSCW.

Robin Murphy Texas A&M University	Robin Roberson Murphy (IEEE Fellow) received a B.M.E. in mechanical engineering, a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science in 1980, 1989, and 1992, respectively, from Georgia Tech, where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. She is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M and directs the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and an IEEE Fellow. Her research interests are artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and heterogeneous teams of robots and she has over 100 publications including the best selling textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics (MIT Press 2000). She is a founder of the fields of rescue robots and human-robot interaction. In 2008, she was awarded the Al Aube Outstanding Contributor award by the AUVSI Foundation, for her insertion of ground, air, and sea robots for urban search and rescue (US&R) at 11 disasters, including the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Charley, and the Crandall Canyon Utah mine collapse. Since arriving at Texas A&M in 2008, she has been leading an initiative in emergency informatics, which stems in part from witnessing valuable data from robots not reaching the right decision maker. Dr. Murphy is active in the community, having served on the IEEE Robotics and Automation executive committees, numerous National Academies and defense boards, including the Defense Science Board.

Sam Ade Jacobs ABB Corporate Research at NCSU	Sam Ade Jacobs holds a PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University, advised by Prof. Nancy Amato. He is currently a research scientist at NC State University Centennial campus of ABB Research working on large-scale data analytics for industrial systems including robotics. His broad research interests include robot motion planning, parallel and distributed algorithms, graph analytics, machine learning, and computational and data science. His work in some of these areas has led to publications and research award in top parallel computing and robotics conferences including ICRA and IROS. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, and African Robotics Network (AFRON).

Rafael Fierro University of New Mexico	Rafael Fierro is a Professor of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), University of New Mexico. He obtained his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 1997 from the University of Texas at Arlington. Prior to joining ECE’s Systems & Controls Group at UNM in August 2007, Dr. Fierro held a postdoctoral appointment with the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University. His current research interests include cyber-physical systems and robotics, coordination and planning in heterogeneous multi-agent and multi-robot systems, control of network systems with applications to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and hybrid and switched systems. He directs the Multi-Agent, Robotics, Hybrid and Embedded Systems (MARHES) Laboratory. Dr. Fierro’s work has been funded by the Army Research Labs, Department of Energy (DOE), and National Science Foundation (NSF). Prof. Fierro was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a 2004 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the 2008 International Society of Automation (ISA) Transactions Best Paper Award. He served as associate editor for the Journal of Intelligent and Robotics Systems, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He is currently serving as Associate Editor for the new IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems T-CNS.

Radhika Nagpal Harvard University	Radhika Nagpal is a professor in Computer Science, in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is also a core faculty member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where she co-lead the BioRobotics Platform. Before becoming faculty, she spent a year as a research fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, where she is still affiliated. She was a graduate student and postdoc lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a member of the Amorphous Computing Group and the Bell Labs GRPW graduate fellowship program. She is grateful to have received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010), Radcliffe Fellowship (2012), and most recently, the Nature 10 award (2014). She is also the author of a blog article on tenure-track life (7 year postdoc), faculty advisor for the Harvard women-in-cs group (wics), and a strong advocate for a nurturing and inclusive culture in science. Outside of research, she enjoys the arts (dance, music, and painting) and our Indian+Caribbean cultures with her husband and two kids.

Lydia Kavraki Rice University	Dr. Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University. She received her B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research contributions are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics (robot motion planning, hybrid systems, formal methods in robotics, assembly planning, micromanipulation, and flexible object manipulation), as well as in computational structural biology, translational bioinformatics, and biomedical informatics (modeling of proteins and biomolecular interactions, large-scale functional annotation of proteins, computer-assisted drug design, and systems biology). Dr. Kavraki has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and is one of the authors of the robotics textbook titled "Principles of Robot Motion" published by MIT Press. She is heavily involved in the development of The Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL), which is used in industry and in academic research in robotics and bioinformatics. Dr. Kavraki is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Computer Science Review, and Big Data. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. Dr. Kavraki is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her technical contributions. She has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, the Early Academic Career Award from the IEEE Society on Robotics and Automation, a recognition as a top young investigator from the MIT Technology Review Magazine, and the Duncan Award for excellence in research and teaching from Rice University. She is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the World Technology Network (WTN), and has received the Texas Women in Science Award by BioHouston. Dr. Kavraki is a member of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST), and an elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.