NEW Speakers Announced! Colin Angle, Co-Founder and CEO of iRobot, and Takeo Kanade of Carnegie Mellon University
Colin Angle, Co-Founder and CEO of iRobot and Takeo Kanade of Carnegie Mellon University to present at RoboBusiness Conference & Expo 2008
Colin Angle
Co-Founder and CEO of iRobot
'Open Door' Keynote, April 8
Colin Angle guides the strategic direction of iRobot. Angle is a true pioneer in the field of mobile robots, designing the behavior-controlled rovers for NASA that led to the Sojourner exploring Mars in 1997. But more importantly Angle has pioneered business models and relationships responsible for the introduction of multiple commercially viable robotic products in commercial and consumer markets. Angle's vision and commitment were recently recognized when he was named one of the Ernst and Young New England Entrepreneurs of the Year for 2003 (with iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner). This prestigious award lauds his vision, skills, accomplishments and determination in fostering the growth of a brainchild into a successful business. Angle holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in computer science, both from MIT.
Takeo Kanade
U.A. Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh
Keynote Address, April 9
Dr. Kanade's research interests span a wide range of areas: vision, sensors, control, multimedia, manipulators, and autonomous mobile robots. His contributions range from basic theories to devices and total systems. He has written more than 300 technical papers and holds more than 20 patents. His contributions in vision include: face recognition (one of the earliest computer face recognition programs, and later face detectors), shape recovery from line drawings (known as Origami World theory and skew symmetry), stereo (multi-baseline stereo and the world's first full-image video-rate stereo machine), motion image analysis (known as the Lucas-Kanade tracker) and a structure-from-motion theory (known as Tomasi-Kanade factorization), and VLSI computational sensors. He was the co-developer of the concept of direct-drive manipulators and the world's first prototype (CMU DD Arm I). He has initiated, led and collaborated on several major autonomous mobile robots and various application systems since the mid-1980s, including Carnegie Mellon's driverless cars (NavLab), the autonomous helicopter (Robocopter), the computer-assisted hip-replacement surgery system (HipNav), and video surveillance and monitoring system (VSAM). Since 1995, Kanade has been developing a new visual media, which he named "Virtualized Reality". A time-varying event, such as sports, dancing or surgery, is captured by a large number of surrounding cameras, and transformed to a complete 4-D description (time, 3D, and appearance). As one of the applications of such multi-camera technology, he developed a Matrix-like replay system used for broadcasting portions of Super Bowl IIIV in 2001 called CBS "EyeVision".
Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, American Association of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics Society of Japan, and Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers of Japan. The awards he received include the Azriel Rosenfeld Award, the C&C Award, the Joseph Engelberger Award, FIT Funai Accomplishment Award, the Allen Newell Research Excellence Award, the JARA Award, Marr Prize and Longuet-Higgins Prize. Dr. Kanade has served for many government, industrial, and university advisory boards, including the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) of the National Research Council, NASA's Advanced Technology Advisory Committee, PITAC Panel for Transforming Healthcare Panel, and the Advisory Board of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.