2009 GCER Featured Speakers
The following people are scheduled to present at speaker sessions at the 2009 Global Conference on Educational Robotics.
Mark Leon
Manager of the NASA Robotics Alliance Project
NASA Ames Research Center
Mark Joseph Leon received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from San Jose State University. Mr. Leon was accepted in to the Collegiate Electrical Engineering Honor Society Eta Kapp Nu. In 1985 he achieved the status of All American by taking a silver metal in the Collegiate National Judo Championships. He has a first degree Black Belt in Judo and a second-degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do. Since the 1980’s, Mr. Leon has held a number of positions at NASA focused on technical advances, including implementation of the Trans-Atlantic TCP/IP network links between US and Europe, design of permanent high-speed data connectivity to Antarctica supporting NASA’s robotics program, and the first high speed internet link to the Arctic, where he conducted a series of live video broadcasts from the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star near the North Pole supporting NASA’s robotics program. In 1999, Mr. Leon developed NASA’s Robotics Education Project (now called the Robotics Alliance Project) under his mentor Dave Lavery, which has reached out to over 100,000 students nationwide using FIRST robotics and BOTBALL robotics competitions. Each year Mr. Leon MC’s these national competitions to about 20,000 students sporting his NASA jacket and blue hair. From 2001-2006, Mr. Leon was the Deputy Director and then the Director of Education at Ames Research Center supporting ten states from Hawaii to Montana. Mark continues to manage the Robotics Alliance Project inspiring students across America.
Matthew T. Mason
Professor of Computer Science and Robotics
Carnegie Mellon University
Matthew T. Mason earned the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at MIT, finishing his PhD in 1982. Since that time he has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is presently Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and in July 2004 became the Director of the Robotics Institute. His research interests are in robotic manipulation, mobile robot error recovery, mobile robots, and robotic origami. He is co-author of “Robot Hands and the Mechanics of Manipulation” (MIT Press 1985), co-editor of “Robot Motion: Planning and Control” (MIT Press 1982), and author of “Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation” (MIT Press 2001). He is the 2009 IEEE Pioneer Award winner and a winner of the System Development Foundation Prize, as well as a Fellow of the AAAI, and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Luther Palmer III
Postdoctoral Researcher
Case Western Reserve University
Dr. Luther R. Palmer III is a postdoctoral researcher in the Biologically-Inspired Robotics Laboratory at Case Western Reserve University, working to enhance robotic mobility through biological principles. Specifically, cockroach-inspired climbing robots are being designed to perform complex maneuvers on ceilings and vertical surfaces. Dr. Palmer received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University studying the application of intelligent control algorithms to legged robots designed to run at high speeds. Dr. Palmer will soon join the faculty at The University of South Florida and continue working to unlock nature’s secrets that have allowed legged animals to robustly run and jump on the Earth’s most complex terrains. This research will improve prosthetic technology and the effectiveness of robots in military reconnaissance and time-critical search and rescue within unstructured environments.
Alan Schultz
Director
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligenc
Alan C. Schultz is Director of the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington D.C. He has twenty years experience and over 90 publications in robotics, human-robot interaction, and machine learning, and is responsible for establishing and running the robotics laboratory at NRL. Mr. Schultz was selected to teach at the first IEEE/RAS Summer School on Human-Robot Interaction, has been editor of several collections in multi-robot systems, and has chaired many conferences and workshops in robotics and human-robot interaction.
Eddie Tunstel
Space Robotics & Autonomous Control Lead
John’s Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Dr. Eddie Tunstel is the Space Robotics & Autonomous Control Lead in the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD USA where, since 2007, he works toward building robotics capabilities in Civilian Space and other business areas. Before joining APL he was a Sr. Robotics Engineer at NASA JPL for 18 years and worked on developing autonomous control and navigation algorithms, software, and systems for robotics research and space flight projects. He worked on the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers mission as a flight systems engineer for autonomous surface navigation and later as the mobility and robotic arm subsystem lead for surface mission operations. He was born and raised in New York City and attended Howard University in Washington, DC earning B.S. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering, with a concentration in robotics. After several years at JPL he was awarded a JPL Fellowship to pursue doctoral studies at the University of New Mexico where he earned the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of AIAA as well as their technical committees on space robotics.