Harish is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a core faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). His research interests span the areas of robot learning, human-robot interaction, and multi-agent systems. He directs the Structured Techniques for Algorithmic Robotics (STAR) Lab, where he and his team works on structured algorithms that help robots reliably operate and collaborate in unstructured environments alongside humans.

Prof. Pradalier is Associate Professor at GeorgiaTech Lorraine, the French campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology (a.k.a. GeorgiaTech) since September 2012. He defended his “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” (Authority to Supervise Research) in 2015 on the topic of “Autonomous Mobile Systems for Long-Term Operations in Spatio-Temporal Environments” at the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse (INPT). 

His objective is to extend the activity of the CNRS IRL2958 GT-CNRS towards robotics, leveraging on one side the strong robotic research inside CNRS and on the other side the collaboration potential with the Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) laboratory at GTL. 

At the IRL, he is now the coordinator of the H2020 BugWright2 project, has been involved in H2020 project Flourish and PF7 project Noptilus, as well as in projects on environmental monitoring. 

From November 2007 until December 2012, Dr. Pradalier has been deputy director in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich. In this role, he was the technical coordinator of the V-Charge project (IP, 2010-2014) and also involved in the development of innovative robotic platforms such as autonomous boats for environment monitoring or prototype space rovers funded by the European Space Agency. He is a founding member of the ETH start-up Skybotix, within which he was responsible for software development and integration. 

From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Pradalier was a research scientist at CSIRO Australia. He was then involved in the development of software for autonomous large industrial robots and an autonomous underwater vehicle for the monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. 

He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG) on the topic of autonomous navigation of a small urban mobility system and he is Ingénieur from the National Engineering School for Computer Science and Applied Math in Grenoble (ENSIMAG).

Charles Pippin is a Senior Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, GTRI. His research interests include collaborative autonomy algorithms, machine learning, and multi-robot systems. In his current work, he is investigating cooperation between autonomous systems, as part of GTRI's Unmanned Systems Initiative. Charles received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2013. His research advisor was Prof. Henrik I. Christensen. Charles received an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2004 and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Devi Parikh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, and a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). From 2013 to 2016, she was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. From 2009 to 2012, she was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with University of Chicago. She has held visiting positions at Cornell University, University of Texas at Austin, Microsoft Research, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Facebook AI Research. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2009 respectively. She received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rowan University in 2005. Her research interests include computer vision and AI in general and visual recognition problems in particular. Her recent work involves exploring problems at the intersection of vision and language, and leveraging human-machine collaboration for building smarter machines. She has also worked on other topics such as ensemble of classifiers, data fusion, inference in probabilistic models, 3D reassembly, barcode segmentation, computational photography, interactive computer vision, contextual reasoning, hierarchical representations of images, and human-debugging.

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, Gary McMurray interviewed for a number of jobs. Most were in the defense industry, and the job duties were very specific.

“I joke about one job that was to design fuel pumps for the aft section of cargo planes,” McMurray recalled. “I asked, ‘Well, what if I want to design fuel pumps for the front section?’ They said, ‘No. That’s a different skill set.’”

The job sounded too constraining and unappealing to McMurray, so he continued his job search, interviewing with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in 1989. He had been working in robotics, a relatively new field at the time.

“I was looking for something in robotics, and GTRI was trying to get into robotics,” he said. “They didn’t have anybody working in that field at all, so I was really the first person hired to work in that area. It gave me an opportunity to start from scratch and develop something unique and different. I really enjoyed that.”

Three decades later, McMurray still works at GTRI.

“I wear two hats in the organization,” he said. He is the division chief for the Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division, and an associate director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM), working with director Seth Hutchinson.

The Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division conducts research to improve the human condition through transforming the agricultural and food systems, sustainable use and access to energy and water, and improving workplace safety and pandemic response. IRIM is an umbrella under which robotics researchers, educators, and students from across campus can come together to advance a wide variety of robotics activities at the Institute.

The Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division has approximately 36 research faculty and 40 students. The unit hires about 10% of all the students at GTRI and maintains close ties with the academic side of campus.

“One of the things I enjoy in my role as a division chief is the ability to set the vision and mission,” McMurray said. “We’re a little bit different from the rest of GTRI because we don’t do the Department of Defense work. We work a lot with the campus, but we also work with other universities on sustainability projects regarding food or energy. The projects have the potential to make a big impact. I describe it as having one foot on the basic research side and one foot on the applied side. We have master’s and Ph.D. students doing cutting-edge basic research, and we’re also building systems and applying research and deploying things into the field.”

The division’s food processing research includes improving yield, food quality, and food safety while minimizing the environmental impact by applying image processing, robotics, biosensors, and environmental treatment technologies. The division also conducts air quality research, including monitoring and reducing the effects of vehicular emissions.

So, what’s the connection between food processing and auto emissions?

“To solve problems in both of those areas we employ general research technologies — robotics, chemical and biological sensing, data analytics, machine learning, systems engineering, and then energy and materials,” McMurray said. “Approaches that work in traditional manufacturing may not work in the food industry. There is no CAD drawing for a boneless chicken breast or a chicken leg. Each one is different. It’s also wet, slippery, and could be spoiled.”

That’s where sensing and data analytics come into play. The same applies to analyzing vehicular emissions.

“When you look at food processing, our work really brings together all of these different skill sets. And then when you look at the data analytics side of air quality emissions, the team has the longest continuous set of data about air quality in the city. This has been the key database that the EPA uses for studying carbon emissions for automobiles,” McMurray said.

After more than 30 years at GTRI, McMurray still gets excited when a plan comes together.

“The most rewarding part of the work is when you can bring together the basic research and the applied, build a system that does something new and novel, put it into the field and test it, and have somebody come back and say, ‘That’s really cool. That worked.’”

Dr. Anirban Mazumdar joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2018. Dr. Mazumdar studies robot mobility with the goal of understanding and achieving agile, versatile, and efficient robot behaviors in unstructured environments. His previous experience includes a postdoctoral research position in the High Consequence Automation and Robotics Group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He has broad experience with novel robotic systems including energy efficient bipedal robots, reconfigurable aerial vehicles, prosthetic devices, and relaxed stability mobile robots.

Dr. Mazumdar started at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in January of 2019 and currently has a courtesy appointment with the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. She graduated with her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Sandia National Laboratories in the Diagnostic Science and Engineering group. Her research interests include the design of new diagnostic techniques and sensor systems for studying combustion, multiphase flows, hypersonic flows, and energetic materials. Her group utilizes new composite sensing materials, optical diagnostics, magnetostatics, and system identification methods to study these complex physical phenomena.

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. I am also affiliated with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and serve as an Associate Director of ML@GT which is the machine learning center recently created at Georgia Tech. Previously I was a Research Scientist at SRI International Sarnoff in Princeton, and before that received my Ph.D. in 2010 with Professor Ron Arkin as my advisor. I lead the RobotIcs Perception and Learning (RIPL) lab. My areas of research specifically focus on the intersection of learning methods for sensor processing and robotics, developing novel machine learning algorithms and formulations towards solving some of the more difficult perception problems in these areas. I am especially interested in moving beyond supervised learning (un/semi/self-supervised and continual/lifelong learning) as well as distributed perception (multi-modal fusion, learning to incorporate information across a group of robots, etc.).

David Hu is a fluid dynamicist with expertise in the mechanics of interfaces between fluids such as air and water. He is a leading researcher in the biomechanics of animal locomotion. The study of flying, swimming and running dates back hundreds of years, and has since been shown to be an enduring and rich subject, linking areas as diverse as mechanical engineering, mathematics and neuroscience. Hu's work in this area has the potential to impact robotics research. Before robots can interact with humans, aid in minimally-invasive surgery, perform interplanetary exploration or lead search-and-rescue operations, we will need a fundamental physical understanding of how related tasks are accomplished in their biological counterparts. Hu's work in these areas has generated broad interest across the fields of engineering, biology and robotics, resulting in over 30 publications, including a number in high-impact interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Nature Materials, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as popular journals such as Physics Today and American Scientist. Hu is on editorial board member for Nature Scientific Reports, The Journal of Experimental Biology, and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Center for Creative Design of Materials. He has won the NSF CAREER award, Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty award, and best paper awards from SAIC, Sigma Xi, ASME, as well as awards for science education such as the Pineapple Science Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize. Over the years, Hu's research has also played a role in educating the public in science and engineering. He has been an invited guest on numerous television and radio shows to discuss his research, including Good Morning America, National Public Radio, The Weather Channel, and Discovery Channel. His ant research was featured on the cover of the Washington Post in 2011. His work has also been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, National Geographic, Popular Science and Discover His laboratory appeared on 3D TV as part of a nature documentary by 3DigitalVision, "Fire ants: the invincible army," available on Netflix.

Ai-Ping Hu is a principal research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division. He received his BS in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining GTRI in 2009, Dr. Hu co-founded a start-up robotics company applying learning control to achieve high precision in lightweight flexible manufacturing robots.  His current research interests include agricultural robotics, nonlinear control and vision-guided manipulation.