Invited Speakers, CRV 2012

Allan Jepson, University of Toronto

Bio: Allan Jepson received his B.Sc. in 1976 from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1980 from the California Institute of Technology. He then moved to a postdoctoral position in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University. In 1982 he joined the faculty at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a full professor since 1991. His current research interests span a range of topics in computer vision, including image grouping, image segmentation, and motion estimation.

Oliver Brock, Technische Universität Berlin

Bio: Oliver Brock is the Alexander von Humboldt professor of robotics at the Technische Universität Berlin. He was an assistant and associate professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2002 to 2009. He received his computer science diploma in 1993 from the Technische Universität Berlin and his Masters and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University in 1994 and 2000, respectively. He was co-founder and CTO of AllAdvantage.com. He also held post-doc positions at Rice University and Stanford University. Oliver Brock's research focuses on mobile manipulation, interactive perception, manipulation learning, and the application of robotic algorithms to problems in structural molecular biology.

Paul Newman, University of Oxford

Bio: Prof. Paul Newman obtained an M.Eng. in Engineering Science from Oxford University in 1995. He then undertook a Ph.D. in autonomous navigation at the Australian Center for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, Australia. In 1999 he returned to the United Kingdom to work in the commercial sub-sea navigation industry. In late 2000 he joined the Dept of Ocean Engineering at M.I.T. where as a post-doc and later a research scientist, he worked on algorithms and software for robust autonomous navigation for both land and sub-sea agents. In early 2003 he returned to Oxford as a Departmental Lecturer in Engineering Science before being appointed to a University Lectureship in Information Engineering and becoming a Fellow of New College in 2005. Over the course of his career he has developed a particular expertise in the application of probabilistic methods to robotic navigation and mapping. His focus lies on pushing the boundaries of navigation techniques in terms of both endurance and scale. He is on the editorial board for the top two robotics science journals (IJRR, and JFR), was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for Europe in 2009 and 2010 and is the IEEE media spokesman for robotics and automation. In 2012 he will be Program Chair for the premier robotics conference - Robotics Science and Systems. In 2010 he was awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship.