It’s been another fabulous year for the CARIS Lab at UBC. Our group has grown in number (both in terms of robots and people) and we can celebrate many successes. We congratulate Jeswin Jeyasurya and Susana Zoghbi on their graduation and welcome new students Amir Haddadi (Postdoc), Jenny Sullivan (MASc Candidate) Aiden Misraeidi (M.Eng. Candidate). Undergraduate coop/project/visiting students Andrew Strang, Andrea Slade, Hina Shah, and Max Ittermann, Matthew Smale and Sara Sheikholeslami have all made great contributions to our group and we are pleased to have them be part of the CARIS crew. We have also been very pleased to welcome Charlie the PR2 to our group - joining Carla the WAM, Roger, Betty and Riser in a growing robot family.
CARIS Highlights for Elizabeth include the successful launch of the Collaborative, Human-focused, Assistive Robotics for Manufacturing (CHARM) research project in partnership with GM Canada, Laval and McGill, and (of course) the arrival of PR2. Visits to Laval (twice!), the road trips to the lab retreat in Hope and the Tech HVC mine in Logan Lake (and NOT hitting a deer), IROS and participation on the HRI program committee at Georgia Tech also loom large. Activities related to the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering have also required a fair amount of planes, trains and automobiles. The greatest satisfaction has been to see the development of CARISians – current and alum - into truly world-class researchers with interesting and exciting ideas about how people and robots can work and play together.
Highlights for Mike: The most rewarding aspect of being part of the lab is working with the people here. Not only is everyone making quick strides forward in their research, but it’s been with good spirits and a totally-UP dynamic all the way. Last academic year saw the arrival of real robot skin as part of an undergraduate project: now the WAM arm will not only know when to say “ow!”, but it can light itself up where it was hit. I had a chance to go to 4 conferences over the summer and fall of 2011: FICCDAT in Toronto (UT-Rehab Institute is awesome, especially the room-size 6-D motion platform that makes our MOOG look like a miniature), ICORR in Zurich, RO-MAN in Atlanta and IROS in San Francisco. I met up with many people in the rehab robotics and HRI arenas I hadn’t seen in several years, hopefully leading to new networking opportunities. It was also gratifying to see that the consulting work I did on PR1 at Stanford 5 years ago may have had a small part to play in making the Willow Garage PR2 the incredible research robot it is. We now have our very own PR2– the first in Canada – and we are looking forward to having it be the platform we count on for many of the individual projects we have on-going in the lab. It’s going to be a great 2012!
Amir
2011 was an amazing year for me. I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation which has opened a new chapter in my life. I have been very pleased to join the CARIS lab at UBC as a postdoc in October and to work on the CHARM project. Getting to know great students, postdocs, and professors, which are all very friendly and also hardworking, and visits to GM assembly site and Laval University have been the most exciting highlights for me since I joined the group. I hope that I can make valuable contributions to the goals of the CARIS lab in the coming year.
Sina
CARIS Highlights for Sina include one paper presentation in ROBIO conference and one paper submission to ACC conference in partnership with Dave Meger as a result of a PhD project to develop algorithms to search for a lost target visually. Initializing a 7-DoF WAM arm and controlling it under a real time operation system as a joint project with Dave Meger and Ambrose Chan also took a significant amount of time. Lunching UBC-ASME student section in the UBC Mechanical Engineering Department was also a successful achievement.
Best Regards,
Sina Radmard.
Thom
This past year Thom successfully completed his balance studies with the RISER robot platform. After months of shocking calf muscles, anaesthetizing nerves, and swinging people around on top of a robot, he finally knows everything there is to know about how we humans hold ourselves up. Well maybe not quite everything, but enough to complete his thesis and move on to new adventures in a new year!
Ajung
This year was filled with excitement for AJung. Her first set of conference papers were published at ITCH, CHI (a collaborative work with Matt Pan and others), and IROS. With a tremendous amount of help from Mike and Dr. Danielson, her very first journal paper was published in IJSR. More interestingly, she realized the power of social media in academia. She gave roboethics related talks in an online virtual world, went to Europe to attend the Bridging the Robotics Gap conference with the help of philosophers on facebook whom she got to meet in person there, and collected over 50 participants for her second online survey through twitter and blogs. With the help of Elizabeth and IEEE Women in Engineering, she also had the chance to give talks in real life at a Café Scientifique event and fulfill her childhood dream of giving talks at a high school. But most memorable from this year, though, are the times she sat by Carla feeling defeated while trying to get the last thesis experiment running. The CARISians were always there to cheer her on, and pull her through until the very last subject had left the lab! With big hugs and thanks, she is looking forward to starting her PhD at CARIS in 2012.
Matt
Season’s Greetings to Everyone!
Over the past year, some of my colleagues and I have been busy working on several exciting projects in the lab. This year has been quite a busy one for all of us in the CARIS lab, especially those of us nearing the end of our degrees. Over the past year, I have been busy running experiments, writing papers, attending conferences, helping to run Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association events, and TAing. As busy as it was, however, the team at CARIS always seems to fit in some fun. Sometimes when we needed a break, we would try to get Charlie (our PR2 robot) to pose for some of our fantastic photo shoots (see photo) or even attempt some dance moves (as you would expect, Charlie’s pretty good at doing the ‘robot’!). It is on this note that I would like to announce that I will soon be finishing my master’s degree. At this time I wish to thank my supervisors, coworkers, friends and many others for all of the help and support they have given me over the past two years. I feel that I have gained much and hope that I have contributed much from the experience. With this being said, I like to wish that this holiday season and upcoming New Year brings you joy and good fortune.
Happy Holidays!
Matt
Eric
Eric has had a busy year of research, coursework, and TA’ing. He is currently the vice-president of the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association, and is chairing the organizing committee for the 2012 Canadian Engineering Competition. Eric was a TA for Mech 221 Dynamics, and really enjoyed his role. Eric’s research is yielding promising results towards better understanding the coordinate transforms done by the human vestibular system; he hopes to submit for publication in January.
Ergun
For Ergun, 2011 was mostly about making decisions, in addition to grading piles of exams. Making up his mind to work on non-verbal human communication cues was the first major decision of the year, and it was followed by another important one that will affect the next four years of his life - going for a PhD! :) In 2011, CARIS became more and more home to him. In the last quarter of the year, the newest member of the lab PR2 a.k.a. Charlie, joined the team and having finished his required courses, Ergun had more time to working on a collaborative project to make PR2 be able to move autonomously between the two labs. Apart from the time he spent on his studies, 2011 was a year that was filled with lots of joy, friendship, music and photography!
Navid
Highlights of 2011 for Navid includes successful finishing of his Masters course work with high standings, putting the idea of “helping people as an engineer” into research on stroke rehabilitation robots, working on four different robots/platforms in the CARIS lab including PR2, WAM arm, phantom, and the manipulandum, my brother’s wedding and my sister’s engagement (although I didn’t get to be physically there), a thriving year with Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association as the Vice-president Finances, making lots and lots of friends, collaborating in ongoing research at the labs of Dr. Nicola Hodges and Dr. Lara Boyd, and getting published.
Wesley
It’s the end of the year and looking back at 2011, it has been a great year at CARIS with lots of fun. This year I got to run my first entire human subject experiment – everything from designing the experiment, doing BREB, building my own apparatus, recruiting volunteers, and running the actual experiments, to analyzing the data, and finally writing a paper. The best part of my year was having my first paper to be as one of the 25% accepted for HRI 2012 (spending most of my summer break working on the paper was worth it!).
For next year, I am looking forward to travelling to Boston for the HRI Conference and Teaching our PR2robot Charlie how to handover things to people.
Jenny
Greetings from 37,000 feet! As I'm flying back to Vancouver from vacationing with my family, I realized that it's actually somewhat appropriate to be reflecting on my year from an airplane, since I've spent an unusually large amount of time at this altitude over the course of 2011: after graduating from Rice in May, I took my last flight from Houston home to Philadelphia; add to that a handful of visits to Vancouver, a wedding, and a couple vacations, and you get about 24 plane rides around North America in the last 12 months!
I don't think I could have picked two more different places to go to school than Houston and Vancouver: arriving in Houston, I was used to being greeted by Tex-Mex restaurants, palm trees, and taxi drivers navigating 12-lane highway structures. In Vancouver, on the other hand, I step off the plane and walk through the "pacific passage," a Native art display complete with a canoe in a miniature pond, animal sounds, and a 20-foot thunderbird hanging from the ceiling. Actually, one thing that the two cities do have in common is that once you get outside, your chances of staying dry decrease significantly - whether it's humidity or rain, be prepared to feel a bit damp! Still, the transition to Canadian life has been interesting: I've learned words like "keener" and "invigilate", and that college is different from university; I'm slowly getting used to using Celsius, centimeters, and colorful money; and eventually, I'll learn all the rules of hockey.
Anyway, I can't believe it's already the end of the year and I've finished my first semester of grad school. It doesn't feel like 12 months have passed since I was getting my transcripts together and sending in my application… time flies, eh?
Happy holidays and New Year!
Picture: going through the Panama Canal! View from the side of the boat
We hope you have enjoyed reading our letter and we wish you all the best for the holidays and for a great 2012.
Very best regards
The Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab
0 comments:
Post a Comment