IRIS is an interdepartmental unit of USC's School of Engineering with ties to USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). Members include faculty, graduate students, and research staff associated with different laboratories. Founded in 1986, it provides a focal point for government- and industry-sponsored research in robotics, machine vision, and manufacturing systems. IRIS publishes a Technical Report Series and coordinates a comprehensive educational program at USC.
This document briefly describes research laboratories and affiliated faculty. For more information, please contact individual researchers or the IRIS Directors.
Dr. Apostolos earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University in the School of Education with a minor in the Dept. of Philosophy. Her M.A. in Dance is from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Physical Education/Dance for Southern Illinois University-Carbondaly. She has taught at Stanford University, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, and recently completeda sabbatical leave at Princeton University in the Dept. of Psychology.Her research has been in the development of Robot Choreography and the integration of art and technology. Apostolos has serve as a NASA/ Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech in the area of Space Telerobotics.
George A. Bekey received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1952 and 1962, respectively. His primary research interests are in robotics, intelligent manufacturing and information processing in biological systems. He has published more than 175 technical papers, co-authored one book and edited four volumes the most recent being Neural Networks in Robotics (Kluwer, 1993) co-edited with Ken Goldberg. His current research concerns various aspects of robotics (including robot learning, robot hands and walking machines), planning assembly and prosthetics. His work in the field has included positions at UCLA, Beckman Instruments and TRW. He is the Editor of Autonomous Robotics, Founding Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and a member of the Editorial Boards of Transactions of the Society for Computer Simulation, Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, and Production Planning and Control. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the ACM, AAAI, the Neural Networks Society, AAAS and the Biomedical Engineering Society.
Kenneth Y. Goldberg received a dual degree (B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.S. in Economics) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. Working with Matt Mason at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, he completed the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1987 and 1990 respectively. He also studied at Edinburgh University and the Technion. In January of 1991, he joined the faculty at USC with a joint appointment in Computer Science and EE-Systems. Goldberg is a Senior Member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and is Associate Director of USC's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. He has served as reviewer for a number of journals and conferences and organized workshops at the past two IEEE Robotics and Automation Conferences. At the 1994 Conference, a paper written with his students on Modular Fixturing won the Best Paper Award. In 1994, he was named by the NSF as a National Young Investigator.
Dr. Grossman has over 22 years experience in Manufacturing Research, spanning robotics, machine vision, computer-aided mechanical design, and computer integrated manufacturing. A Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to Robotics and Automation, he has BA, MA, and PhD degrees in Physics from Harvard. Prior to joining ISI, Grossman spent 24 years as a researcher and Senior Manager at the IBM Yorktown Research Lab, working in image processing, networking, manufacturing automation, and AI, publishing over 60 papers and generating about 9 patents. He spent three IBM sabbatical years at Stanford, as Visiting Scholar at the AI Lab and as SRC Researcher in Residence at the Center for Integrated Systems. He also had three 1-year assignments in IBM as Technical Advisor to the president of Industrial Systems, to the VP of Manufacturing Research, and to the Director of Research. Prior to IBM, he taught physics at Princeton. Grossman is in several professional societies, has held various editorial positions, and has been on several academic and government panels related to design, manufacturing, robotics, AI, and standards.
Behrokh Khoshnevis is also the Director of Manufacturing Engineering Program at USC. His primary research interests are in computer aided manufacturing and in computer simulation. His current research activities are in automated process planning, concurrent engineering, measurement planning, and intelligent simulation environments. Dr. Khoshnevis is a senior member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Computer Simulation. Dr. Khoshnevis has designed several large-scale software systems that have been used by industries such airframe and electronics manufacturing. He has also developed modern CAD/CAM laboratories for three universities. Dr. Khoshnevis has recently designed and developed the EZSIM simulation software. His book on the subject of computer simulation is published by McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Sukhan Lee received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1982 and received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Korea. Since then, he has been with the departments of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Southern California, firstly as an assistant professor and then as an adjunct associate professor. He is also affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He has been active in research in the areas of robotics and automation, neural networks, and intelligent systems. His research interests include intelligent robotic and man/machine systems connecting perception and action through machine intelligence and mechanical dexterity, assembly and task planning for computer integrated manufacturing, and neural computation, control, and information processing.
Gerard Medioni received the Diplome d' Ingenieur from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, Paris, France in 1977 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from USC in 1980 and 1983, respectively. His primary research interests are in all aspects of computer vision: low level tasks such as edge detection and contour extraction, grouping of such features into more semantic entities, inference of shape from various sources, representation of visual knowledge, algorithms and architectures to carry out the previous tasks.
Ramakant Nevatia received his B.S. degree from the University of Bombay and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, from Stanford University. Professor Nevatia's research interests are primarily in the fields of machine vision, robotics and artificial intelligence. He is Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. He is the author of two books: Machine Perception, Prentice-Hall 1982 and Computer Analysis of Scenes of 3-D Curved Objects, Birkhauser-Verlag, 1976. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing Journal and the Pattern Recognition Journal. He was also formerly an editor for Robot Vision for the IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation.
Keith Price received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977. His research interests include image analysis and artificial intelligence. Dr. Price is the Editor of the Newsletter for the ACM Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence.
Aristides A. G. Requicha received the Engenheiro Electrotecnico degree from the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal, in 1962, and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in 1970. He joined USC in 1986, after thirteen years at the University of Rochester, where most recently he was the director of the Production Automation Project. He also has been a lecturer in physics at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, a lieutenant in the Portuguese Air Force, and a research scientist with NATO's SACLANT Research Center in La Spezia, Italy. Dr. Requicha is best known for his work on geometric modeling of 3-D solid objects. The theory and algorithms he developed are used in several geometric modelers, including Rochester's PADL systems. These are disseminated widely, and several commercially available CAD/CAM systems have been built upon PADL-2.
Dr. Requicha's primary research interests are in Automation and Robotics, and encompass the design, implementation and theoretical underpinnings of CAD/CAM systems for mechanical products. With his students he is building novel software systems that exploit and integrate techniques from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Geometry. A major goal is to develop Engineering Environments (analogous to Programming Environments), which are integrated suites of computational tools for the concurrent design of mechanical products and processes. Current research topics are centered on spatial reasoning, and include (1) modeling and reasoning about geometric uncertainty, (2) automatic planning of manufacturing and inspection tasks, (3) automatic design of fixtures, and (4) direct manipulation of molecular nano-structures.
Dr. Will joined IBM in 1964 and worked in simulation, robotics, vision, tactile and force sensing, chip and wafer inspection, LANDSAT image rectification, image and audio processing and compression. He started and managed the IBM Research activity on robotics, 3-D geometric modeling, high level robot task languages, and path planning that resulted in the IBM RS/1 robot product in 1982. He was awarded the Engelberger Prize in robotics in 1990. In the early 1980's, he joined Schlumberger as Director of Product Systems responsible for the product engineering of instrumentation for down-hole oil well evaluation. He subsequently was Director of Systems Science leading work on Artificial Intelligence for oil exploration at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Center. He was Director of VLSI Systems Research at the Schlumberger/Fairchild Research Center in Palo Alto Ca. Joining Hewlett Packard in 1987 as Director of HP Labs' Manufacturing Research Center, he worked on simulation of factories using VLSI behavioral modeling techniques, dynamic scheduling, design for manufacturability, microassembly of microwave MCM's, and systems for board and computer MCM assembly. In 1988, he was given additional responsibility for the Measurement and Manufacturing Center and directed work on 111- V semiconductors, photonics and high speed circuits, superconductivity, analytical chemistry and medical instrumentation, in addition to manufacturing. He was named H-P's Director of Design Systems from 1991-2, producing a ten year plan for HP in that area.
He joined ISI/USC in June 1992 as Director of the High Performance Computing and Communications Division with a mandate that includes initiating work with a broad charter in manufacturing systems.