The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 2:00pm EDT by Dr. Daniela Rus titled Pervasive Robots.

Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She is also a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. Prior to joining MIT, Rus was a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College.

Abstract: 

The digitization of practically everything coupled with the mobile Internet, the automation of knowledge work, and advanced robotics promises a future with democratized use of machines and wide-spread use of robots and customization. However, pervasive use of robots remains a hard problem. Where are the gaps that we need to address in order to advance toward a future where robots are common in the world and they help reliably with physical tasks? What is the role of computation along this trajectory?

In this talk I will discuss challenges toward pervasive use of robots and recent developments in algorithms for customizing robots. I will focus on a suite of algorithms for automatically designing, fabricating, and tasking robots using a print-and-fold approach. I will also describe how computation can play a role in creating robots more capable of reasoning in the world.  By enabling on-demand creation of functional robots from high-level specifications, we can begin to imagine a world with one robot for every physical task.

To join the webinar, please register here by 11:59pm EDT on Tuesday, April 19, 2016.