Dr. Edvard Bruun joined the faculty in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2024. He completed his Ph.D. (2024) in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. Dr. Bruun is also a licensed professional engineer in Canada and worked as a structural engineer at Arup before pursuing his Ph.D.

Dr. Bruun’s research centers on robotic automation for the assembly and disassembly of large-scale building components. He develops computational methods to design geometrically complex yet material-efficient structures that demand robotic fabrication for their construction. By harnessing the spatial precision and multifunctionality of cooperative multi-robot systems, Dr. Bruun coordinates multiple industrial robotic arms to execute intricate tasks. These include providing temporary structural support and facilitating the addition, removal, or repurposing of building components in collaboration with human operators.

Dhruv Batra is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and AI, with a focus on developing intelligent systems that are able to concisely summarize their beliefs about the world with diverse predictions, integrate information and beliefs across different sub-components or `modules' of AI (vision, language, reasoning, dialog), and interpretable AI systems that provide explanations and justifications for why they believe what they believe. In past, he has also worked on topics such as interactive co-segmentation of large image collections, human body pose estIMaTion, action recognition, depth estIMaTion, and distributed optimization for inference and learning in probabilistic graphical models. He is a recipient of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2016), the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2014), Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2014), Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor award (2015), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2013, 2015), Amazon Academic Research award (2016), Carnegie Mellon Dean's Fellowship (2007), and several best paper awards (EMNLP 2017, ICML workshop on Visualization for Deep Learning 2016, ICCV workshop Object Understanding for Interaction 2016) and teaching commendations at Virginia Tech. His research is supported by NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, DARPA, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. Research from his lab has been extensively covered in the media (with varying levels of accuracy) at CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg Business, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, The Verge, New Scientist, and NPR. From 2013-2016, he was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he led the VT Machine Learning & Perception group and was a member of the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems (VaCAS) and the VT Discovery Analytics Center (DAC). From 2010-2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2010 respectively, advised by Tsuhan Chen. In past, he has held visiting positions at the Machine Learning Department at CMU, CSAIL MIT, Microsoft Research, and Facebook AI Research.

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.

Sean Wilson is a Senior Research Engineer serving as the Collaborative Autonomy Branch Chief for the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Additionally, he serves as the Director of the Robotarium Lab (https://www.robotarium.gatech.edu/) at Georgia Tech, which enables people around the world to deploy robotic algorithms onto robotic hardware free of charge.

He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Arizona State University in 2017 and a B.A. degree in physics and mathematics from the State University of New York at Geneseo in 2012. He previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dr. Wilson’s research interests include remotely-accessible robotic hardware, collaborative autonomy, as well as the control of multi-agent and swarm robotic systems. 

Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. At Georgia Tech, he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Human-Centered Computing, a Co-Director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and a Fellow of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. For more than thirty years, Ashok has conducted research into artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-centered computing, with a focus on computational design, modeling and creativity. His recent work has explored design thinking, analogical thinking and systems thinking in biological inspired design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRDQ4hr9i8), and his research is now developing virtual research assistants for modeling biological systems. Ashok teaches a popular course on knowledge-based AI as part of Georgia Tech's program on Online Masters of Science in Computer Science. He has pioneered the development of virtual teaching assistants, such as Jill Watson, for answering questions in online discussion forums (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbCguICyfTA). Chronicle of Higher Education recently called virtual assistants exemplified by Jill Watson as one of the most transformative educational technologies in the digital era. Ashok is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI's AI Magazine.

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I received my Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab and as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute prior to joining Georgia Tech. I direct the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, where we work on developing robots that are able to effectively operate in human environments. My research interests span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adjustable autonomy, human computation and cloud robotics. Please visit the RAIL lab website for a description of our latest projects.

Jaydev P. Desai, Ph.D, is currently a Professor and BME Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in August 2016, he was a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1993. He received his M.A. in Mathematics in 1997, M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in 1995 and 1998 respectively, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He is a recipient of several NIH R01 grants, NSF CAREER award, and was also the lead inventor on the "Outstanding Invention of 2007 in Physical Science Category" at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. In 2011, he was an invited speaker at the National Academy of Sciences "Distinctive Voices" seminar series on the topic of "Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery" at the Beckman Center. He was also invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering's 2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has over 150 publications, is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics (currently in preparation). His research interests are primarily in the area of image-guided surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and rehabilitation robotics. He is a Fellow of the ASME and AIMBE.

Dr. Dellaert does research in the areas of robotics and computer vision, which present some of the most exciting challenges to anyone interested in artificial intelligence. He is especially keen on Bayesian inference approaches to the difficult inverse problems that keep popping up in these areas. In many cases, exact solutions to these problems are intractable, and as such he is interested in examining whether Monte Carlo (sampling-based) approxIMaTions are applicable in those cases.

Sarah Li will join the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering in January 2025. Her research advances multi-agent models and algorithms to overcome challenges facing future air and space mobility systems. Her research lies at the intersection of game theory, stochastic control, and optimization to enable optimal and safe decision-making of autonomous systems in interactive settings. Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington and her B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at ETH Zurich in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. She was a 2020 Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellow and a 2022 University of Washington Condit Graduate Fellow. During her Ph.D., she interned with Microsoft Research to develop supply chain games and Loon to develop multi-disciplinary design optimization for stratospheric balloons.

Tom Sammon focuses on implementing lean manufacturing practices and helping companies develop capital equipment applications.