The Speakers
Dr. Dylan A. Shell
Dylan A. Shell is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. He received his BSc degree in computational & applied mathematics and computer science from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and his M.S. and Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He joined Texas A&M in 2009. His research aims to synthesize and analyze complex, intelligent behavior in distributed systems that exploit their physical embedding to interact with the physical world. His current focus is on questions related to algorithmic and formal foundations for such systems. He has published papers on multi-robot task allocation, robotics for emergency scenarios, biologically inspired multiple robot systems, multi-robot routing, estimation of group-level swarm properties, minimalist manipulation, rigid-body simulation and contact models, human-robot interaction, and robotic theatre. His work has been funded by DARPA and the NSF; and he has been the recipient of the Montague Teaching award, the George Bekey Service award, and the NSF Career.
Dr. Alyssa Pierson
Alyssa Pierson is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. Her research interests include trust and cooperation in multi-agent systems, distributed robotics control, and socially-compliant autonomous system design. She focuses on designing robotic systems that interact with humans and other robots in complex, dynamic environments. Prior to joining BU, Professor Pierson was a research scientist with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She received her PhD degree from Boston University in 2017 and BS in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College. During her PhD, she was awarded the Clare Booth Luce Fellowship. She was a Best Paper Finalist at the 2016 International Conference on Robotics and Automation and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Award.
Dr. Fumin Zhang
Dr. Fumin ZHANG is Dean’s Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He received a PhD degree in 2004 from the University of Maryland (College Park) in Electrical Engineering, and held a postdoctoral position in Princeton University from 2004 to 2007. His research interests include mobile sensor networks, maritime robotics, control systems, and theoretical foundations for cyber-physical systems. He received the NSF CAREER Award in September 2009 and the ONR Young Investigator Program Award in April 2010. He is currently serving as the co-chair for the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Marine Robotics, associate editors for IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems.
Dr. Herbert Tanner
Bert Tanner received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the NTUA, Athens, Greece, in 2001. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania from 2001 to 2003, and subsequently took a position as an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. In 2008 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he is currently a professor. In 2019 he was appointed Director of the Center for Autonomous and Robotics Systems. Tanner's research interests are in the areas of multi-robot system planning and control, with emphasis on flocking and swarming, constrained navigation, heterogeneous coordination, and hybrid systems. He received NSF's Career award in 2005, he is a fellow of the ASME, and a senior member of IEEE. He has served in the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IFAC Automatica, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and IFAC’s Nonlinear Analysis Hybrid Systems. He is currently a chief specialty editor for Frontiers in Robotics and AI for the section on multi-robot systems. He has also been serving in several conference editorial boards of both IEEE Control Systems and IEEE Robotics and Automation Societies.
Dr. Kostas Bekris
Kostas Bekris is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is working in algorithmic robotics, where his group is developing algorithms for robot planning, learning and perception especially in the context of robot manipulation and multi-robot problems. Applications include logistics and manufacturing with a focus on taking advantage of novel soft, adaptive mechanisms. His research has been supported by NSF, DHS, DOD and NASA, including a NASA Early Career Faculty award. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Rice University in 2008 under the guidance of Prof. Lydia Kavraki.