DRF Lunchtime Clinic - Prof Amanda Prorok

We are excited to welcome Prof Amanda Prorok to the DRF Lunchtime Clinic where she will be talking on Future-Proofing Robotics: Crafting Environments for Tomorrow’s Machines. Amanda is Professor of Collective Intelligence and Robotics in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at Cambridge University and the talk will cover co-design algorithms that consider both robots as well as their operational environments as design variables.

Bio

Prof Prorok’s research focuses on multi-agent and multi-robot systems to find new ways of coordinating artificially intelligent agents (e.g., robots, vehicles, machines) to achieve common goals in shared physical and virtual spaces, pioneering methods for differentiable communication between learning agents. Their research brings in methods from machine learning, planning, and control, and has numerous applications, including automated transport and logistics, environmental monitoring, surveillance, and search. 

Prior to joining Cambridge, Amanda was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland. She has been honored by numerous research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, the EPSRC New Investigator Award, the Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Award, and several Best Paper awards. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) prize for the best thesis at EPFL in Computer Science. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL) and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO).