Officers Serving IEEE RAS SCV Chapter for the year 2014.
Waiming Mok, President
Waiming is one of the 5 members who drove the activities in the formation of the Silicon Valley chapter of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He has drove product development and introduction for IT data center products for companies including Sun Microsystems, Quantum Corp, NetFRAME Systems, and others. He was also a software development engineer for Advanced Computer Communications working on network router products. He has an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University as well as an M.A. in math master and B.S. in physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has built robots as a hobby and has studied robotics, computer vision, and IoT. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.
Dr. Edward Katz, Program Chair
Dr. Katz initiated the formation of the Silicon Valley chapter of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He is a Consulting Professor at Carnegie Mellon West in the Software Engineering program. Previously, he was with Hewlett Packard Laboratories (Palo Alto) where he was a involved in a wide variety of research including industrial robotic software systems, CAM-based factory automation, and agent-based personal assistants. Prior to joining HPLabs, he was on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Recently, he was invited to be a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford University Computer Science Department's Robotics Laboratory collaborating with Prof. Nils Nilsson. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Purdue University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization in artificial intelligence and software systems, from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Dr. Katz has published technical papers in international conferences, holds a patent and is the author of several pending patent applications. He is a member of the AAAI, ACM, IEEE.
David Murphy, Treasurer
David is one of the 5 members who drove the activities in the formation of the Silicon Valley chapter of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. David has 25 years experience in integrated circuit development and EDA software. He participated in the circuit design, placement and routing and test development of Bell Laboratory's first 32 CPU, the WE32000. David provided technical leadership on ICs for Apple Computer's Newton PDA. He was an early employee of SDA Corporation, the first major private EDA company that later became Cadence Design System and developed new algorithms for fast estimation of IC cost and performance at HLD Design and InTime Software. David's personal interests are in music, language, heterogeneous multiprocessing and biological neural systems and their application to autonomous robots.
Nagasrikanth Kallakuri, Secretary
Nagasrikanth is a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie in Robot audition, multimodal environmental cognition, signal processing with emphasis on audio-visual speech recognition. He graduated with Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 and obtained Bachelor of Technology in Electronics and Communications Engineering at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, India in May 2010. Prior to starting PhD, he worked as a Research Engineer at ‘Intelligent Robotics and Communications Laboratory’ at the ‘Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan’ for about two years. During that time, he worked on Indoor autonomous navigation, dynamic obstacle avoidance, robot audition, multi-modal mapping and human comfortability analysis for wheelchair navigation. He worked as an executive committee member of the ECE Graduate Student Association of CMU and served as an officer of the University IEEE Student chapter during Undergraduation. Nagasrikanth is currently directing a robotics lab and mentoring undergraduate students at BVRIT, Hyderabad in India.