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Events for March 19, 2008
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Meet USC
Wed, Mar 19, 2008
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/visit/events/meet_usc/ to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: USC Admission Center
Audiences: Prospective Freshmen and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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CS Colloq: Biomimetic Legged Locomotion and Odor Guided Behavior for Humanitarian Landmine Detectio
Wed, Mar 19, 2008 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Biomimetic Legged Locomotion and Odor Guided Behavior for Humanitarian Landmine DetectionSpeaker: Dr. Thrishantha Nanayakkara (Harvard) Abstract:
Humanitarian demining is a pre-requisite to the economic revival of many affected countries like Angola, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Kosovo, Cambodia, Sri Lanka etc. My current research efforts make an attempt to find answers to three fundamental questions: 1. How a trace of explosives can be localized using a sensory signal gradient leading to the source 2. How a robotic platform can guide such a sensor under ground contact force constraints (to avoid detonating mines) in an unstructured environment with soft terrain conditions like in an abandoned mine field 3. How a colony of such robots and sensors can adaptively re-organize their collective behaviors to identify the locations of the explosive traces in the most efficient manner. The talk elaborates a project in progress in Sri Lanka in collaboration with the Harvard University to find answers to the above questions. The current focus is on a heterogeneous system of trained rodents, field robots, and human experts to detect landmines in an unstructured forest environment. A salient feature of the proposed system is that each sub-system (robots, animals, and humans) improve their individual capabilities by interacting with each other while performing an area coverage operation in a minefield.Biography:
Thrishantha was born in 1970 in Galle, Sri Lanka. He graduated with a first class honors degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa in 1996. He secured the MSc degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998 and the PhD degree in Systems Control and Robotics from Saga University in 2001. From 2001 ¡V 2003 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (www.bme.jhu.edu/~reza ). From 2003 to date, he has been in the faculty of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He is the principle investigator of the ¡§laboratory for intelligent field robots¡¨ at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (www.mrt.ac.lk/iarc/thrish ). He has been awarded the outstanding researcher award of the University of Moratuwa in 2006. He has published 4 book chapters, 7 international journal papers, and 26 international conference papers. He was the founding general Chair of the International Conference on Information and Automation with technical co-sponsorship of IEEE region 10. At present he is a research fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, USA. Keywords: Field robots for landmine detection, animal-robot cooperation, adaptive control, reinforcement based learning, fuzzy and neural network based control, evolutionary optimization.Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
