Organizers:

Ehsan Hashemi, PhD, IEEE Senior Member, Assistant Professor (and the Director of NODE Lab), Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta

E-mail: ehashemi@ualberta.ca

Mailing Address: 10-203 Donadeo Innovation Center for Engineering 9211 - 116 Street NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 1H9

Short biography: Ehsan Hashemi received his PhD in Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering in 2017 from University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta and the Director of the Networked Optimization, Diagnosis, and Estimation (NODE) lab. Previously, he was a visiting professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2019. His research is focused on distributed and fault-tolerant control, cooperative intelligent transport systems, and human robot interaction.

Arunava Banerjee, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta

E-mail: arunava2@ualberta.ca

Mailing Address: Networked Optimization, Diagnosis, and Estimation (NODE) Lab, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 1H9

Short biography: Arunava Banerjee received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2021 from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India and is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta. Previously he had worked as a R&D engineer at IFB Industries, Bangalore, India. His area of research includes distributed navigation for autonomous vehicles, optimization, robust control, learning-aided controls, and control of resource constraint systems.

Neel Bhatt, PhD Candidate, IEEE Member, Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo

E-mail: npbhatt@uwaterloo.ca

Mailing Address: Engineering 3 Building - Room 4102, 200 University Avenue West Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1

Short biography: Neel Bhatt is currently pursuing his PhD degree in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at University of Waterloo. Neel received his BASc. in  Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Robotics from University of Toronto. Neel conducts research in perception and prediction for autonomous vehicles at the Mechatronics Vehicle Systems Lab (MVS) as well as NODE Lab. He is currently investigating methods to improve performance of real-time object trajectory prediction algorithms and interaction aware motion forecasting models for various urban driving settings. During his time at University of Waterloo, Neel has been leading efforts on the WATonoBus project working on software and algorithmic development of the perception and prediction modules, and also worked at General Motors R&D as a Software Engineering Intern and developed deep learning models for enhancing vehicle state estimation.