Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems
School of Engineering
University of Southern California

Faculty

• Margo Apostolos, Associate Professor, Director of Dance and Movement, School of Theatre.
  Dr. Apostolos earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University in the School of Education with a minor in the Dept. of Philosophy. Her M.A. in Dance is from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Physical Education/Dance for Southern Illinois University-Carbondaly. She has taught at Stanford University, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, and recently completeda sabbatical leave at Princeton University in the Dept. of Psychology.Her research has been in the development of Robot Choreography and the integration of art and technology. Apostolos has serve as a NASA/ Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech in the area of Space Telerobotics.

• George A. Bekey, Emeritus. Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering.
  George A. Bekey received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering >from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1952 and 1962, respectively. His primary research interests are in robotics, intelligent manufacturing and information processing in biological systems. He has published more than 175 technical papers, co-authored one book and edited four volumes the most recent being Neural Networks in Robotics (Kluwer, 1993) co-edited with Ken Goldberg. His current research concerns various aspects of robotics (including robot learning, robot hands and walking machines), planning assembly and prosthetics. His work in the field has included positions at UCLA, Beckman Instruments and TRW. He is the Editor of Autonomous Robotics, Founding Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and a member of the Editorial Boards of Transactions of the Society for Computer Simulation, Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, and Production Planning and Control. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the ACM, AAAI, the Neural Networks Society, AAAS and the Biomedical Engineering Society.

• Maja J Mataric, Professor of Computer Science and Neuroscience
  Director, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES)
  Co-Director, Robotics Research Lab
  Senior Associate Dean for Research
  Viterbi School of Engineering (VSoE)
  Maja Mataric joined USC in September 1997, after two and a half years as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and the Volen Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, and her Ms in Computer Science from MIT in 1990. She has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, the Free University of Brussels AI Lab, LEGO Cambridge Research Labs, GTE Research Labs, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and ATR. Her lab conducts research in control, cooperation, and learning in complex multi-robot and multi-agent systems, and cognitive neuroscience modeling of visuo-motor skill learning through imitation.

• Gerard G. Medioni, Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
  Gerard Medioni received the Diplome d' Ingenieur from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, Paris, France in 1977 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from USC in 1980 and 1983, respectively. His primary research interests are in all aspects of computer vision: low level tasks such as edge detection and contour extraction, grouping of such features into more semantic entities, inference of shape from various sources, representation of visual knowledge, algorithms and architectures to carry out the previous tasks.

• Ramakant Nevatia, Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
  Ramakant Nevatia received his B.S. degree from the University of Bombay and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, from Stanford University. Professor Nevatia's research interests are primarily in the fields of machine vision, robotics and artificial intelligence. He is Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. He is the author of two books: Machine Perception, Prentice-Hall 1982 and Computer Analysis of Scenes of 3-D Curved Objects, Birkhauser-Verlag, 1976. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing Journal and the Pattern Recognition Journal. He was also formerly an editor for Robot Vision for the IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation.

• Keith Price, Research Associate Professor, Computer Science.
  Keith Price received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977. His research interests include image analysis and artificial intelligence. Dr. Price is the Editor of the Newsletter for the ACM Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence.

• Aristides A.G. Requicha, Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
  Gordon Marshall Chair in Engineering
  Aristides A. G. Requicha received the Engenheiro Electrotecnico degree >from the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal, in 1962, and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in 1970. He joined USC in 1986, after thirteen years at the University of Rochester, where most recently he was the director of the Production Automation Project. He also has been a lecturer in physics at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, a lieutenant in the Portuguese Air Force, and a research scientist with NATO's SACLANT Research Center in La Spezia, Italy. Dr. Requicha is best known for his work on geometric modeling of 3-D solid objects. The theory and algorithms he developed are used in several geometric modelers, including Rochester's PADL systems. These are disseminated widely, and several commercially available CAD/CAM systems have been built upon PADL-2.

  Dr. Requicha's primary research interests are in Automation and Robotics, and encompass the design, implementation and theoretical underpinnings of CAD/CAM systems for mechanical products. With his students he is building novel software systems that exploit and integrate techniques from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Geometry. A major goal is to develop Engineering Environments (analogous to Programming Environments), which are integrated suites of computational tools for the concurrent design of mechanical products and processes. Current research topics are centered on spatial reasoning, and include (1) modeling and reasoning about geometric uncertainty, (2) automatic planning of manufacturing and inspection tasks, (3) automatic design of fixtures, and (4) direct manipulation of molecular nano-structures.

• Wei-Min Shen Research Associate Professor Computer Science Department and Senior Research Scientist Information Sciences Institute
  Director, Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory
  Associate Director, USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems
  After receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1989, Dr. Wei-Min Shen worked for five years at the Microelectronic and Computer Technology Corporation MCC , as a Member of Technical Staff on the projects of CYC and Carnot, and later, as a Senior Member of Technical Staff and the Project Leader, on the KnowledgeMiner project. He joined the University of Southern Carlifornia in 1994, and is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Information Science Institute , and a Research Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department .

• Gaurav S. Sukhatme Associate Professor Computer Science Department
  Co-Director, Robotics Research Lab
  Director, Robotic Embedded Systems Lab
  Gaurav Sukhatme received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1991. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1993 and 1997 respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. Dr. Sukhatme's current research focusses on 1. developing techniques for accurate measurement and benchmarking of mobile robot performance, 2. estimation theory approaches to mobile robot fault tolerance and mapping and 3. modeling and control issues related to the development of haptic interfaces. He is a member of IEEE and AAAI.

• Peter Will, Principal Research Scientist, USC/ISI.
  Dr. Will joined IBM in 1964 and worked in simulation, robotics, vision, tactile and force sensing, chip and wafer inspection, LANDSAT image rectification, image and audio processing and compression. He started and managed the IBM Research activity on robotics, 3-D geometric modeling, high level robot task languages, and path planning that resulted in the IBM RS/1 robot product in 1982. He was awarded the Engelberger Prize in robotics in 1990. In the early 1980's, he joined Schlumberger as Director of Product Systems responsible for the product engineering of instrumentation for down-hole oil well evaluation. He subsequently was Director of Systems Science leading work on Artificial Intelligence for oil exploration at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Center. He was Director of VLSI Systems Research at the Schlumberger/Fairchild Research Center in Palo Alto Ca. Joining Hewlett Packard in 1987 as Director of HP Labs' Manufacturing Research Center, he worked on simulation of factories using VLSI behavioral modeling techniques, dynamic scheduling, design for manufacturability, microassembly of microwave MCM's, and systems for board and computer MCM assembly. In 1988, he was given additional responsibility for the Measurement and Manufacturing Center and directed work on 111- V semiconductors, photonics and high speed circuits, superconductivity, analytical chemistry and medical instrumentation, in addition to manufacturing. He was named H-P's Director of Design Systems from 1991-2, producing a ten year plan for HP in that area.

  He joined ISI/USC in June 1992 as Director of the High Performance Computing and Communications Division with a mandate that includes initiating work with a broad charter in manufacturing systems.