Artificial Intelligence

My research spans robotics, haptics, multi-modal perception, and artificial intelligence, at the intersection of computer science and engineering. There are two highly related themes in my robotics research: one is the focus on “contact sport”, i.e., the contact and interaction between a robot or a part/tool it holds and the environment, and the other is real-time adaptiveness of robots to uncertainty and uncertain changes in an environment based on perception.

Emmanuel Agu is currently a professor in the computer science department at WPI having received his Masters and PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests are in the areas of computer graphics, mobile computing, and wireless networks. He is especially interested in research into how to use a smartphone as a platform to deliver better healthcare.

Berk's research primarily focuses on problems related to robotic manipulation, which is a key functionality largely missing from the current state of the art in robotics for unstructured environments, including homes, modern warehouses, and collaborative manufacturing stations. He develops multi-modal robotic manipulation strategies mainly focusing on the role of vision feedback for coping with uncertainties of unstructured environments.

After graduating from UNH with a chemical engineering degree in 2005, Danielle Cote worked as a researcher at Saint-Gobain in the Northboro Research and Development Center in polymer science and data automation.  Cote continued working while she pursued a master’s degree at WPI, followed by a PhD fellowship, and joined the WPI faculty in 2016. 

Autonomous vehicles – aircraft, cars, rovers, over- and underwater vehicles that can move in the real world by themselves without human pilotage – have gained immense importance not only due to the broad spectrum of their potential military and civilian applications, but also due to the concurrent development of sensor technology and embedded systems that enable the realization of true autonomy.

Being a faculty member is a privilege through which I can teach and mentor many students. My area of expertise is in computer engineering. More specifically, I conduct research on integrated circuits and embedded systems design for wireless communications, autonomous driving, and Internet of Things. I teach computer engineering courses at all levels from transistors, gates, circuits, processors, to computer systems. Courses I've taught include digital logic, VLSI design, HDL modeling, computer architecture, and reconfigurable computing.

Dr. Jean King is an active neuroscientist and Peterson Family Dean of Arts & Sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Previously Dr.

Dr. Xiaozhong Liu is an Associate Professor at Computer Science and Data Science, WPI. Before that, he was Associate Professor at School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests include natural language processing (NLP), text/graph mining, information retrieval/recommendation, metadata, and computational social science. His dissertation at Syracuse University (advisor Dr. Elizabeth D. Liddy) explored an innovative ranking method that weighted the retrieved results by leveraging dynamic community interests.

Dr. Markus Nemitz serves as an Assistant Professor of Robotics Engineering at WPI and leads the Robotic Materials Group (RMG). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 2018 and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard until 2020. Pushing towards his vision of rapidly designing robots and materializing them at points of impact, his research interests encompass 3D-printable robotics, real-time adaptive additive manufacturing, automated discovery processes for material systems, and integrated robot ecosystems.

The focus of my research is designing innovative tools for swarm robotics. I am developing Buzz, a programming language specifically designed for real-world robot swarms. During my Ph.D., I have designed ARGoS, which is currently the fastest general-purpose robot simulator in the literature. Recent work focuses on human-swarm interaction and multi-robot learning. I am also working on swarm robotics solutions for disaster response scenarios, such as search-and-rescue and firefighting.

As founding Head of the interdisciplinary Data Science program here at WPI, I take great pleasure in doing all in my power to support the Data Science community in all its facets from research collaborations, and new educational initiatives to our innovative industry-sponsored and mentored Graduate Qualifying projects at the graduate level.

Carolina Ruiz is the Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Harold L. Jurist ’61 and Heather E. Jurist Dean's Professor of Computer Science. She joined the WPI faculty in 1997. Prof. Ruiz’s research is in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Mining, and their applications to Medicine and Health. She has worked on several clinical domains including sleep, stroke, obesity and pancreatic cancer. Prof.

My research interests are in applied machine learning, computer vision, data science and their applications to education, affective computing, and human behavior recognition. My work is highly interdisciplinary and frequently intersects cognitive science, psychology, and education. Before joining WPI, I was a research scientist at the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning at Harvard University. In 2012, I co-founded Emotient, a San Diego-based startup company for automatic emotion and facial expression recognition.

My research spans robotics, haptics, multi-modal perception, and artificial intelligence, at the intersection of computer science and engineering. There are two highly related themes in my robotics research: one is the focus on “contact sport”, i.e., the contact and interaction between a robot or a part/tool it holds and the environment, and the other is real-time adaptiveness of robots to uncertainty and uncertain changes in an environment based on perception.