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Welcome New Faculty

We would like to welcome Farshid Alambeigi, Joydeep Biswas, Jose del R. MIllan, and Yuke Zhu.

Alambeigi, Biswas, Millan, Zhu

Welcome to Farshid Alambeigi

Dr. Farshid Alambeigi is an Assistant Professor who joined the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering in August 2019. Dr. Alambeigi directs the Advanced Robotic Technologies for Surgery (ARTS) Lab. Dr. Alambeigi’s research focuses on developing high dexterity and situationally aware continuum manipulators, soft robots, and appropriate instruments especially designed for less/minimally invasive treatment of various medical applications. Utilizing these novel surgical instruments together with intelligent control algorithms, the ARTS Lab in collaboration with the UT Dell Medical School will work toward digital surgery and partnering dexterous intelligent robots with surgeons: "Ultimately, our goal is to elevate the clinicians’ skills and quality of the surgery to further improve patient safety."

 

Welcome to Joydeep Biswas

Dr. Joydeep Biswas is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science. His research areas include perception, planning, and failure recovery for autonomous mobile robots. These topics support his  goal of having autonomous service mobile robots deployed on a campus to city scale, both indoors and outdoors, in real world human environments, performing assistive tasks accurately and robustly on demand, over deployments spanning years. He is most interested in tackling research problems that will directly improve long-term autonomy on real world robots deployed in human environments. Prior to joining UT Austin, Joydeep was an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, and his B.Tech in Engineering Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008.

 

Welcome to José del R. Millán

Dr. José del R. Millán is a professor and holds the Carol Cockrell Curran Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a professor in the Department of Neurology of the Dell Medical School. He received a PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, in 1992. Previously, he was a research scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra (Italy) and a senior researcher at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny (Switzerland). He has also been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford as well as at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. Most recently, he was Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL), where he helped establish the Center for Neuroprosthetics. Dr. Millán has made several seminal contributions to the field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI), especially based on electroencephalogram signals. Most of his achievements revolve around the design of brain-controlled robots. He has received several recognitions for these seminal and pioneering achievements, notably the IEEE-SMC Nobert Wiener Award in 2011 and elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2017. In addition to his work on the fundamentals of BMI and design of neuroprosthetics, Dr. Millán is prioritizing the translation of BMI to end-users suffering from motor and cognitive disabilities. In parallel, he is designing BMI technology to offer new interaction modalities for able-bodied people.

 

Welcome to Yuke Zhu

Dr. Yuke Zhu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and a leading mind in robot vision and learning. Dr. Zhu received his master’s and PhD from Stanford University. His doctoral thesis centers around closing the perception-action loop to make robot intelligence more generalized and applicable to less-controlled environments. As an undergraduate, he received dual degrees from Zhejiang University and Simon Fraser University. Dr. Zhu’s publications have won several awards and nominations, and his work has been covered by media outlets, such as MIT Technology Review and Stanford News. In addition, he’s had research collaborations with Snap Research, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and DeepMind Technologies