Organizers

Clément Gosselin

Clément Gosselin is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Université Laval Québec and Canada Research Chair in Robotics and Mechatronics. His research interests are kinematics, dynamics and control of robotic mechanical systems with a particular emphasis on the mechanics of grasping, the kinematics and dynamics of parallel manipulators and the development of human-friendly robots, and his work has been the subject of numerous publications in international journals and conferences as well as of several patents and two books. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. Dr. Gosselin has received several awards including the ASME DED Mechanisms and Robotics Committee Award in 2008 and the ASME Machine Design Award in 2013. He was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010 for contributions to research in parallel mechanisms and under-actuated systems, and is a fellow of the ASME, of the IEEE, and of the Royal Society of Canada.

Paul Johnston is an independent consultant specializing in scientific research and technological development, from policy and program development to evaluation. From 2008 through 2015, he was also Senior Associate with HAL. Prior to joining HAL, Paul was President of Precarn Incorporated, an organization that funded and promoted collaborative research and development in the field of robotics and intelligent systems. Previously, Mr. Johnston held the position of Vice President, Operations from 2000 and before that he was the founding Network Manager for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, a university-based research network working in the same fields. Prior to joining Precarn in 1990, Mr. Johnston was the Director of Planning and Coordination with the Canadian Space Agency and with the Space Policy Sector of the Department of Industry, Science and Technology, where his responsibilities included policy and drafting advice respecting the legislation creating the Space Agency, negotiations for the Space Station agreements and the RADARSAT Program, and long-term space program planning. Mr. Johnston was trained as a lawyer (Called to the Bar in Ontario in 1985) and as an engineer (BASc, 1971, University of Toronto), with a specialty in Aerospace Engineering.

Jonathan Kelly is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and the Director of the Space & Terrestrial Autonomous Robotic Systems (STARS) Laboratory. Before joining the University of Toronto, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Robust Robotics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Nick Roy. He completed his Ph.D. in the Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory at the University of Southern California, under the supervision of Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme. His research interests include 3D computer vision, probabilistic modelling, estimation theory, and machine learning.

Dana Kulić

Dana Kulić is an Associate Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where she directs the Adaptive Systems Laboratory. She is a founding co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Human Movement Understanding and an Associate Editor with the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. In 2014, she was awarded Ontario’s Early Researcher award for her work on rehabilitation and human-robot interaction. Her research interests include human motion analysis, robot learning, humanoid robots, and human-machine interaction.