Illah Nourbakhsh
| Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
412-268-2007
illah @ ri.cmu.edu |
Illah R. Nourbakhsh is Associate Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He was on leave for the 2004 calendar year, at NASA/Ames Research Center serving as Robotics Group lead. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, electric wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion. His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution, and planning and scheduling algorithms. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millennium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is a founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc., which was recently acquired by Witness Systems, Inc. Illah recently co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "My efforts in the areas of educational robotics and human-robot interaction have convinced me that Quality of Life Technologies are not only a way to have real, measurable impact on the effectiveness with which technology makes the life of people better; but that this also serves as an ideal domain in which to weave education and technology literacy throughout the education pipeline."
