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: "ASV planning for Harmful Cyanobacteria Blooms and Exploration of Underwater Caves"
Bio: Dr. Rekleitis is currently an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of South Carolina, and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Computer Science, McGill University. His research has focused on mobile robotics and in particular in the area of cooperating intelligent agents with application to multi-robot cooperative localization, mapping, exploration and coverage. His interests extend to computer vision and sensor networks.
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: "Field Robotics in Degraded Rangelands"
Bio: Chris Heckman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Jacques I. Pankove Faculty Fellow in the College of Engineering & Applied Science. He earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2008 and his PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University in 2012, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. He had postdoctoral appointments at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC as an NRC Research Associate, and at CU Boulder as a Research Scientist, before joining the faculty there in 2016. From 2021-2023, Heckman also worked with Amazon as a Visiting Academic with their Scout program, focused on mobile robots for sidewalk delivery.
Heckman's research focuses on autonomy, perception, field robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He directs the Autonomous Robotics and Perception Group, a dynamic and close-knit research team aiming to develop practical and explainable techniques in probabilistic artificial intelligence. His work in computer vision, machine learning and sensor fusion has applications to intelligence, defense, and environmental monitoring. His robotics work is used by both government and industry partners in the development of autonomous vehicles, agricultural platforms and other mobile robots including for medicine, search & rescue, and automation.
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: "Drone-based observation for wildlife behavioral ecology and conservation"
Bio: Dr. Blair Costelloe is a behavioral ecologist interested in the collective and antipredator behavior of large African mammals. As an EU-funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, she led the HerdHover project to develop drone- and image-based methods for studying the collective behavior of animals in their natural environments. She is currently a principle investigator on the EU-funded WildDrone project, which aims to develop new drone-based technologies for wildlife conservation missions. Her research focuses on understanding the role animal behavior in driving broader-scale ecological processes.
Blair is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2014.
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.
Talk Title: "Bioinspired Drones for Environmental Sensing and Manufacturing"
Bio: Prof. Mirko Kovac is director of the Aerial Robotics Laboratory and full professor at Imperial College London. He is also heading the Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) in Zürich. His research group focusses on the development of novel mobile robots for distributed sensing and autonomous manufacturing in complex natural environments. Prof. Kovac's particular specialisation is in robot design, hardware development and multi-modal sensor mobility.
Before his appointment in London, he was post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University and he obtained his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) in 2005.
Since 2006, he has presented his work in more than 100 peer reviewed publications in leading conferences and journals, has won several best paper awards and has delivered over 100 keynote and invited lectures. He also regularly acts as advisor to government, investment funds and industry on robotics opportunities.
Cover photo from Adrien - stock.adobe.com