Stephen Balakirsky is the Chief Scientist for the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and the Director of Technical Initiatives at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) at Georgia Tech.

Balakirsky’s research interests include robotic architectures, planning, bio-automation, robotic standards, and autonomous systems testing. His work in knowledge driven robotics couples real-time sensors and knowledge repositories to allow for flexibility and agility in robotic systems ranging from assembly and manufacturing systems to surveillance and logistics systems. The framework promotes software reuse and the ability to detect and correct for execution errors.

Previously, Balakirsky worked as a project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and was a senior research engineer at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). At ARL, Balakirsky performed mobile robotics research in several areas, including command and control, mapping, human-computer interfaces, target tracking, vision processing and tele-operated control.

Alex Adams’s research focuses on designing, fabricating, and implementing new ubiquitous and wearable sensing systems. In particular, he is interested in how to develop these systems using equity-driven design principles for healthcare. Alex leverages sensing, signal processing, and fabrication techniques to design, deploy, and evaluate novel sensing technologies.

Originally a musician, Alex became fascinated by how he could capture and manipulate sounds through analog hardware and digital signal processing, which led him back to his hometown (Concord, NC). Alex completed his BS at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2014 and his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2021 (advised by Professor Tanzeem Choudhury). Alex then became the resident Research Scientist for the Precision Behavioral Health Initiative at Cornell Tech (NYC) until the fall of 2022, when he joined the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently, his research focuses on the equity-driven design and the development of multi-modal sensing systems to simultaneously assess mental and physical health to enable a new class of mobile health technologies.