Invited Speakers

Talk Title:  "Autonomous Monitoring of Biogeochemical Health Indicators at Marine Extremes."

Bio: Dr. Victoria Preston is a field roboticist and oceanographer who develops embodied intelligence to tackle outstanding environmental sampling challenges in the expeditionary sciences, such as uncovering complicated dynamical relationships in partially-observable spatiotemporal systems or analyzing long-term, long-range trends in in situ data. As a member of several science expeditions, Victoria has deployed autonomous robots to observe short-lived greenhouse gas emission events in the Canadian Arctic, track metal-rich plumes in the deep-ocean produced by hydrothermal vents, and monitor coral reef recovery in Puerto Rico. Her algorithmic research centers on embedding scientific intuition into probabilistic, data-driven models of complex, dynamic distributions, and performing practical-time decision-making for selective sampling.

Dr. Preston earned her SM and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, and her research has been supported by a NDSEG graduate fellowship, MIT Martin Fellowship for Sustainability, and Northeastern University Future Faculty Fellowship. She will start as an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering in Fall 2024.

Talk Title: "Autonomous systems for the uncertain future of Caribbean reefs"
Bio: Lauren is a coral reef ecologist focused on improving methods to survey and measure the health of reef ecosystems. She analyzes long-term reef monitoring data to model and identify drivers of reef resilience in the US Virgin Islands. Recognizing the low resolution and gaps in long-term monitoring data, she champions high-tech approaches to improve survey accuracy and efficiency, including photogrammetry to generate photorealistic 3D records from which metrics beyond planar coral and algae percentage cover can be extracted. She is also part of a team developing methods to use robotics and AI for diverse research applications, from detecting rare species on deep mesophotic reefs to monitoring spawning behaviors of endangered groupers, towards deploying autonomous reef monitoring systems to supersede handwritten surveys. Together with the team at UVI, Lauren is optimistic about incorporating autonomous systems and other emerging technologies to expand capabilities for studying vulnerable reef ecosystems.

Talk Title: "Moving north: Monitoring natural environments from temperate forests to glaciers"
Bio: François Pomerleau made his debut in research by interacting with the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency during his studies in computer engineering at Sherbrooke University. He got his Master’s degree (François Michaud’s Lab) from this university in 2009 after a one-year stay at EPFL (Roland Siegwart Lab - Switzerland) where he worked on an autonomous car prototype. He completed his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich (Roland Siegwart’s Lab- Switzerland) in 2013 during which he participated in several robotic deployments in uncontrolled environments, including work with European fire brigades and in alpine lakes. After technology transfer activities at Alstom Inspection Robotics and a stay at Laval University (Philippe Giguère’s Lab), he received a postdoctoral fellowships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to continue his research at the University of Toronto in Mobile Robotics (Tim Barfoot’s Lab). He continued his technological transfer activities as a postdoctoral researcher at Laval University in the Robotics Laboratory (Clément Gosselin’s lab) and worked, in collaboration with the Robotiq company, to develop the Industry 4.0. Since September 2017, he is a professor in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department at Laval University.

His research interests include 3D reconstruction of environments using laser data, autonomous navigation, search and rescue activities, environmental monitoring, trajectory planning and scientific methodology applied to robotics.

Talk Title: "Harnessing the Power of Human-Robots Teaming for Environmental Intelligence"
Bio: Peyman Moghadam is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Data61 as well as Professor (Adjunct) at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He leads the Embodied AI Research Cluster at CSIRO Data61, working at the intersection of Robotics and Machine learning. He is also the Spatiotemporal AI portfolio Leader at the CSIRO's Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (MLAI) Future Science Platform, oversees research and development of MLAI methods for scientific discovery in spatiotemporal data streams. In 2022, he served as a Visiting Professor at ETH Zürich. In 2019, he held a Visiting Scientist appointment at the University of Bonn.

Peyman has led several large-scale multidisciplinary projects and won numerous awards, including CSIRO's Julius Career Award, National, and Queensland state iAward for Research and Development, CSIRO’s Collaboration Medal and the Lord Mayor’s Budding Entrepreneurs Award. His current research interests include self-supervised learning for robotics, embodied AI, 3D multi-modal perception (3D++), robotics, and computer vision.

Over the past few years, they have been exploring the concept of human-robot teaming for the monitoring and management of natural ecosystems (terrestrial, marine and subsurface). They have released a few benchmarks such as Wild-Places and WildScenes to push robotics and AI research for natural environments.