Welcome to three new Centre academics

Submitted by Colette Bush on Fri, 13/10/2017 - 13:23

We are delighted to announce the arrival of three new academics to our fast-growing centre. We would like to welcome Dr Lynne Baillie, Dr Hakan Bilen and Dr Thusha Rajendran and all of the experience and expertise they will bring to the Centre.

Dr Lynne Baillie

Lynne is based in the department of MACS at Heriot-Watt University. Her reseach interests are Health and Rehabilitation Technologies & Robotics, Mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Robotic Interaction (HRI).

Git Tutorial

Date: 
Fri, 13/10/2017 - 14:00 to Sat, 14/10/2017 - 13:45
Location: 
Appleton Tower room 7.14, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: 
Vladimir Ivan
University of Einburgh

The Git Tutorial will cover the following:

- Adding READMEs and .gitignore.

- Using a GUI to manage file changes.

- Using a GUI to visualize the history of the repo.

- Creating a feature branch.

- Switching between branches.

- Merging changes from other branches.

- Rebasing a branch.

- Managing remotes.

- Pushing/pulling branches to/from the remote.

- Creating pull requests.

- Reviewing pull requests.

- Merging pull requests.

- Creating, solving, and closing issues.

 

Welcome to Dr. Stefano Albrecht

Submitted by Zoe McGonigle on Wed, 11/10/2017 - 16:47

We would like to welcome Dr. Stefano Albrecht as a supervisor for the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics! He is the new Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in the areas of autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, machine learning, and game theory, with a focus on sequential decision making under uncertainty.

Gateway Event: Designing Processors to Accelerate Robot Motion Planning

Date: 
Wed, 15/11/2017 - 14:30
Location: 
Robotarium Seminar room, Heriot-Watt University
Speaker: 
Professor Daniel J. Sorin
Duke University

Abstract: We have developed a hardware accelerator for motion planning, a critical operation in robotics. I will  present the microarchitecture of our accelerator and describe a prototype implementation on an FPGA. Experimental results show that, compared to the state of the art, the accelerator improves performance by three orders of magnitude and improves power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. These gains are achieved through careful hardware/software co-design.

Welcome to Dr Ioannis Konstas

Submitted by Anne Murphy on Tue, 26/09/2017 - 15:22

Ioannis Konstas recently joined as an assistant professor at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh. His main research interest focuses on the area of Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation (NLG) with an emphasis on data-driven deep learning methods. 

Before that he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, collaborating with Prof. Luke Zettlemoyer (2015-2017). 

IPAB Workshop

Date: 
Thu, 28/09/2017 - 12:45
Location: 
Informatics Forum 4.31/4.33, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: 
Chenyang Zhao & Todor Davchev
University of Edinburgh

This Thursday the IPAB workshop will be the following two talks, with pastries provided.

Speaker: Chenyang Zhao

Title: Tensor Based Knowledge Transfer Across Skill Categories for Robot Control

Computer Science Seminar Series - To Err is Robot

Date: 
Wed, 27/09/2017 - 14:15
Location: 
Robotarium Seminar Room - Earl Mountbatten Building Heriot-Watt University
Speaker: 
Dr. Manuel Giuliani
Bristol Robotics Lab

This Wednesday, as part of the MACS Computer Science Seminar Series, Dr. Manuel Giuliani, Professor in Embedded Cognitive AI for Robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol will be giving a talk at Heriot Watt University.

ABSTRACT

Maybe the robot invasion is a good thing - Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy

Date: 
Tue, 21/11/2017 - 17:00 to Wed, 22/11/2017 - 16:45
Location: 
Disruptive Innovation Festival
Speaker: 
Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy
University of Edinburgh

Maybe the robot invasion is a good thing 

21st Nov, 17:00

Maybe the robots will round us up in internment camps, or maybe we'll be sipping cocktails by the pool while our gadgets sweep our streets and stock our shops. Find out why robotics researcher, Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy prefers to think the future will contain more of the latter than the former.

Mona: an Affordable Open-source Mobile Robot for Research and Education (Workshop)

Date: 
Wed, 25/10/2017 - 15:30
Location: 
Robotarium Seminar Room, Heriot-Watt University
Speaker: 
Dr Farshad Arvin
University of Manchester

15:30 - 17:00 Workshop  "Mona: an Affordable Open-source Mobile Robot for Research and Education"

The workshop is free to attend, but advanced registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mona-an-affordable-open-source-mobile-robot-for-research-and-education-tickets-37982468586

Duration: 60 to 90 min

Requirement: Laptop/PC with installed Arduino Software