Intel Research Pittsburgh

Dave Ferguson

Dave Ferguson is a Research Scientist at Intel Research Pittsburgh, working on planning and coordination for single agents and multi-agent teams. He is currently co-PI of the Personal Robotics project, in which an anthropomorphic robotic arm and mobile robot base coordinate to accomplish useful manipulation tasks in populated indoor environments. He was also the planning lead for Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team, winners of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle race, and the initial software lead for Carnegie Mellon's Mine Mapping Project, in which an autonomous robotic vehicle successfully mapped over 300 meters of an abandoned coal mine. In 2007, one of his planning algorithms was incorporated into the onboard navigation framework of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Dave obtained his Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 and his BSc from Otago University in 2001.

Casey Helfrich

Casey Helfrich is a Research Engineer at the Intel Research Lab in Pittsburgh. He received a Bachelor's degree in Physics from Carnegie Mellon Univeristy in 2001 and an additional BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. He joined the Pittsburgh lab in November 2001 when the walls were still being put up, and helped design and build the IT infrastructure for Intel Research. Casey has contributed to several Intel Research Pittsburgh Projects including Internet Suspend Resume, Diamond, and Dynamic Physical Rendering. His current focus is on the multi-threaded physics and programming simulator for DPR, as well as the computer vision system for Personal Robotics.

Sidd Srinivasa

Siddhartha Srinivasa is a Research Scientist with Intel Research Pittsburgh. He also holds an Adjunct Faculty position at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a co-PI of the Personal Robotics project, in which an anthropomorphic robotic arm and a mobile robot coordinate to accomplish useful manipulation tasks in populated indoor environments. His research focuses on enabling robots to interact faster, better, and smoother with the real world. He received his PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he developed robust controllers for robotic manipulation. He also has a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Intel Research Seattle

Louis LeGrand

As a software engineer for Intel Research, Louis LeGrand was responsible for creating the inference software for Intel's Mobile Sensing Platform. He came to Intel Research from engineering roles with Pixelworks and Boeing. Loius holds a master's degree in aerospace engineering from Iowa State University and another in electrical engineering from the University of Washington.

Ali Rahimi

Ali Rahimi develops machine learning techniques for large-scale vision and sensing problems with recent emphasis on real-time object instance recognition, and on training kernel machines on very large datasets. He joined the Seattle research team in 2005 after completing his doctoral degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ali serves as an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington.

Joshua Smith

Joshua Smith is an Intel Principal Engineer. His research focus in Personal Robotics is on electric field sensing for robotic grasping. As a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joshua invented an electric-field-based passenger airbag suppression system that is now standard equipment in all Honda cars. Since joining Intel, he has also led the development of WISP, a wirelessly powered platform for sensing and computing. Josh is an affiliate faculty member in both the department of Electrical Engineering and the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Carnegie Mellon University

Dmitri Berenson

Dmitry Berenson graduated from Cornell University in 2005 with a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is currently a PhD student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University working on the Intel Personal Robotics project sponsored by the Quality of Life Technology Institute. His interests include manipulation, planning algorithms, grasping, mobile manipulation, and humanoid robotics.

Alvaro Collet-Romea

Alvaro Collet-Romea graduated from Universitat Ramon Llull in 2005 with a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University soon thereafter as a Research Associate. He is currently enrolled on the M.S. program in Robotics and collaborating with the Intel Personal Robotics project. His interests include robotic vision, active sensing, object recognition, and sensor fusion.

Rosen Diankov

Rosen Diankov graduated from University of California Berkeley in 2006 with Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Applied Math degrees. At the moment he is a PhD graduate student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Melon University. Rosen's main research focus is to solve the robotics problem: perception, planning, visualization, and control into one coherent framework. Up until now he has worked on several vision and planning systems involving autonomous robots in everyday scenarios. One of his contributions to the robotics field is an open-source planning framework called OpenRAVE, which is helping to serve as a repository for planning algorithms. At the moment Rosen is working on the Personal Robotics project at Intel Research Pittsburgh.

Garratt Gallagher

Martin Rufli (ETHZ)

Martin Rufli graduated in 2006 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich with a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently a Master student at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH and writes his Master Thesis on path planning for the Segway RMP platform at Intel Research Pittsburgh. He is particularly interested in smooth dynamic path planning and computer vision.

Mike Vande Weghe

Mike Vande Weghe is a Senior Research Engineer at Carnegie Mellon, and is responsible for hardware development, robot control, sensor integration, and multi-robot coordination. Previously, Mike built the ACT Hand (an anatomically-correct robotic hand) and the Millibot Train. Mike also has experience in realtime computer speech recognition, large-scale distributed systems, and high-frequency switching power systems. Mike has an SB in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a MS in Robotics from CMU.