Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis was born in Athens, Greece. He received the Diploma (a 5 year degree, equivalent to a Master of Science) in Electronic and Computer Engineering from Technical University of Crete, Greece in 2006 with highest honors. After moving to the United States of America, he studied at The University of Texas at Arlington with Frank L. Lewis as his advisor and he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2008 and 2011 respectively. From May 2011 to January 2012, he was working as an Adjunct Professor and Faculty Research Associate at the University of Texas at Arlington and at the Automation and Robotics Research Institute. During the period from 2012 to 2016 he was a project research scientist at the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an assistant professor at the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech until 2018. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor at The School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research interests include approxIMaTe dynamic programming, game theory, and optimal control. Recently, his research has focused on cyber-physical security, networked control, smart grid and multi-agent optimization. Dr. Vamvoudakis is the recipient of a 2019 ARO YIP award, a 2018 NSF CAREER award, and of several international awards including the 2016 International Neural Network Society Young Investigator (INNS) Award, the Best Paper Award for Autonomous/Unmanned Vehicles at the 27th Army Science Conference in 2010, the Best Presentation Award at the World Congress of Computational Intelligence in 2010, and the Best Researcher Award from the Automation and Robotics Research Institute in 2011. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu and Golden Key honor societies and is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in America. He has also served on various international program committees and has organized special sessions for several international conferences. He currently is a member of the Technical Committee on Intelligent Control of the IEEE Control Systems Society (TCIC), a member of the Technical Committee on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (ADPRLTC), an Associate Editor of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, an Editor in Chief of the Communications in Control Science and Engineering, a registered Electrical/Computer engineer (PE) and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Jun Ueda joined Georgia Tech in May 2008 as Assistant Professor. Before Georgia Tech, he was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at MIT, where he worked on the development and control of cellular actuators inspired by biological muscle. He developed compliant, large strain piezoelectric actuators and a robust control method called stochastic broadcast feedback. From 2002-2008 he was Assistant Professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, where he led a research group dedicated to dynamics and control in robotics, such as robot hand manipulation, tactile sensing, and power-assisting. From 1996 to 2002 and prior to obtaining his Ph.D, he worked at the Advanced Technology R&D Center of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Japan. Here he was involved in a variety of activities including disk drives, machine tools, and satellite tracking antennas. His Ph.D. work at Kyoto University was on the end-point control of a robot manipulator mounted on a non-rigid base. He studied feedback control robustness in terms of the coupling of the arm and base dynamics.

Benjamin Joffe is a Research Scientist in the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. His work is at the intersection of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Robotics. His research interests include 3D Perception for highly-variable and deformable objects; robot learning for manipulation tasks; real-world generalization from synthetic and multi-modal data; Machine Learning for chemical sensing and biomanufacturing; Deep Learning algorithms for novel modalities and low-data scenarios. 

Maegan received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (ME) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in May 2023. Prior, she also received a M.S. in ME from Caltech in 2019 and a B.S. in ME from Georgia Tech in 2017. After graduating with her Ph.D., Maegan conducted a brief postdoc at Caltech (May–August 2023), followed by a brief research position at Disney Research (September–December 2023). Generally speaking, her research interests lie at the intersection of control theory and human-robot interaction, with specific applications towards lower-limb assistive devices. Much of her research is centered around the question: “What is the right way to walk?”. In her free time, Maegan enjoys puzzles, playing video games, and the piano.

Maegan Tucker joined Georgia Tech as an assistant professor with joint appointments in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the School of Mechanical Engineering in January 2024.

Dr. Lonnie Parker is the Collaborative Autonomy Branch Chief in the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division of the ATAS Laboratory at GTRI and serves as the PI for multiple programs. He has 10+ years of experience in managing DoD-sponsored projects and is focused on designing collaborative behaviors for unmanned systems in both the maritime and air domains. Prior to joining GTRI, Dr. Parker spent seven years at a NAVSEA warfare center, NUWC Division Newport, where he performed research into maritime autonomy through ONR-sponsored and internally funded efforts. Lonnie received a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2012. His research advisor was Prof. Ayanna M. Howard. Lonnie received an M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2006.

Omobolanle Ogunseiju is an assistant professor in the School of Building Construction, at Georgia Tech. Omobolanle received her Ph.D. in Environmental Design and Planning, from the Department of Building Construction, at Virginia Tech.

Her research interests focus on advancing workforce development (safety, health, and well-being), and developing smart communities through the application of wearable robots and Artificial Intelligence (enabled by digital twin, cyber-physical systems, data sensing, and reality capture technologies). She is particularly interested in understanding and shaping the human–technological dynamics involved in workforce development, safety, and health, especially within the construction sector. This includes understanding the ethical concerns of automation and robotics in the construction industry.

Omobolanle is an active member of the Diversity and Inclusion Council at the College of Design. During her Ph.D. studies, Omobolanle was recognized as the outstanding doctoral candidate at the Myers Lawson school of construction, and the outstanding doctoral student in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech.

She believes that the next generation of construction engineers should be trained to serve as innovators, risk managers, and leaders that shape public policy. As such, Omobolanle believes that teaching should be based on promoting experiential learning amongst students, applying a variety of engagement techniques, and providing hierarchical learning assessments. Omobolanle developed and teaches Construction Cost Management at the School of Building Construction, Georgia Tech, and will teach and develop Construction Technology courses in the coming semesters. She had the opportunity to teach course sections and conduct laboratories in Smart Construction, Building Systems Technology, and Wireless Sensing in Construction Management as a graduate teaching assistant at Virginia Tech.

Dr. Danfei Xu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. Xu received a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2015 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2021. His research goal is to enable physical autonomy in everyday human environments with minimum expert intervention. Towards this goal, his work draws equally from Robotics, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision, including topics such as imitation & reinforcement learning, representation learning, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. His current research focuses on visuomotor skill learning, structured world models for long-horizon planning, and data-driven approaches to human-robot collaboration.

Dr. Noel is a Research Engineer II with the Aerospace and Acoustics Technologies Division in GTRI’s Aerospace, Transportation, and Advanced Systems Laboratory (ATAS). She received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2009 and 2018, respectively. In her doctoral work, Dr. Noel specialized in biomechanics, with a particular focus on biological adhesive mechanisms. Her work has been highlighted in media outlets like NPR, The New York Times, Science Magazine, and the Discovery Channel. Dr. Noel’s ongoing areas of research include haptic feedback for mixed reality platforms, biomechanics and bio-inspired design, and additive manufacturing.

Ai-Ping Hu is a principal research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division. He received his BS in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining GTRI in 2009, Dr. Hu co-founded a start-up robotics company applying learning control to achieve high precision in lightweight flexible manufacturing robots.  His current research interests include agricultural robotics, nonlinear control and vision-guided manipulation.

Dr. Yong Cho, MSCE '97, has returned to CEE as an associate professor. Cho comes to Georgia Tech most recently from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he taught construction engineering, construction management, and architectural engineering after earning his doctorate at the University of Texas in 2000. A 2011 recipient of the NSF Early Career Award, his research interests include construction automation, robotics, and transportation. He is leading the development of a new paradigm in these research areas by challenging the current understanding of science/engineering technologies in construction and sustainable built environments. Among the challenges he is investigating are robotizing several critical construction and maintenance tasks and disaster relief efforts.