Carnegie Mellon University

Women of Robotics

Below are some of the astounding faculty and graduate students of the Robotics Institute!

Professors


Professor Nancy Pollard

Nancy Pollard

Nancy Pollard's research is in the area of dexterous grasping and manipulation. Although the act of grasping an object appears very simple, it is actually highly complex. Next time you are cooking a meal, doing maintenance or repairs, or packing for a trip, pay close attention to how you use your hands. People push, rotate, or slide objects to make them easier to grasp. We make constant adjustments based on feedback (haptic, audio, visual, proprioceptive) in order to get a better grip or to guide an action in the way we wish it to go. We can adjust almost instantly to changing situations, for example if we slip or bump into something unexpectedly.

Professor Manuela Veloso

Manuela Veloso

Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of robots that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Professor Veloso is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the President of the RoboCup Federation. She recently received the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning from demonstration. Professor Veloso and her students have concretely researched in the area of robot soccer and have successfully participated in several RoboCup international competitions. Professor Veloso is the author of one book on "Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other books. She is also an author in over 200 journal articles and conference papers.

We've conducted an interview with Professor Veloso, which you can find here!

Professor Katia Sycara

Katia Sycara

Prof. Sycara directs the lab for Advance Agent Technology, www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her work on multi-agent collaboration, negotiation, cooperative and adversarial modeling and planning. She has served as founding Editor in Chief of the International Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and serves on the editorial board of many other journals. She is a founding member of the International Foundation on Multi Agents Systems and of the US and European Foundation for Semantic Web Technologies. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of many corporations and on policy panels. She has authored more than 360 journal, book and conference articles.

Professor Henny Admoni

Henny Admoni

Henny Admoni is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab (http://harp.ri.cmu.edu). Henny studies how to develop intelligent robots that can assist and collaborate with humans on complex tasks like preparing a meal. She is most interested in how natural human communication, like where someone is looking, can reveal underlying human intentions and can be used to improve human-robot interactions. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at Yale University.

We've conducted an interview with Professor Admoni, which you can read here!

Graduate Students


Graduate Student Victoria Dean

Victoria Dean

Victoria Dean is a PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Advised by Abhinav Gupta, she is interested in using self-supervised learning to allow robots to perform complex tasks. Before graduate school, she studied computer science at MIT and worked on autonomous driving, computational biology, and computer vision.