Ross A. Knepper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on the theory, algorithms, and mechanisms of automated assembly. Previously, Ross was a Research Scientist in the Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT. Ross received his M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2011. Before his graduate education, Ross worked in industry at Compaq, where he designed high-performance algorithms for scalable multiprocessor systems; and also in commercialization at the National Robotics Engineering Center, where he adapted robotics technologies for customers in government and industry. Ross has served as a volunteer for Interpretation at Death Valley National Park, California.

Chris received his Diploma degree (equivalent to MSc) in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 2013. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Mechanical engineering, working on the development of motion planning algorithms for seamless navigation of pedestrian environments. In the past he has done research on robotic grasping and robotic hand design.

Wil is a second-year CS PhD student at Cornell. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from UVa in 2015. His primary research interests are in human-robot interaction, multi-agent planning, and programming languages. He is currently working on a project to perform situated language understanding, incorporating context from gesture, memory, and other sources to disambiguate commands from a human.

Zhengqi is a first-year CS PhD student at Cornell. He received his Bachelor Degree in Computer Engineering at University of Minnesota in 2016. He is interested in robotics and computer vision. More specifically, mobile robot navigation, SLAM, sensor fusion and 3D computer vision. In the past he worked with Google Project Tango on a project of real-time indoor navigation system and a project of robot vision for precision agriculture.