Lots of exciting lab news to catch up on:

• Congratulations to the COHRINT Lab’s first PhD graduates Dr. Steve McGuire (AES) and Dr. Brett Israelsen (CS), who successfully defended their PhD theses this past summer!
• Welcome to our three newest Aerospace PhD students: Aastha Acharya, Ofer Dagan, and Shohei Wakayama!
• Congratulations to Luke Burks and Ian Loefgren, whose papers were accepted to and presented at the 2019 FUSION Conference in Ottawa this past summer:
  • L. Burks and N. Ahmed, “Collaborative Semantic Data Fusion with Dynamically Observable Decision Processes”.
  • I. Loefgren, N. Ahmed, E. Frew, C. Heckman, S. Humbert “Scalable Event-Triggered Data Fusion for Autonomous Cooperative Swarm Localization”.
• Congratulations to Jonathan Manni  whose paper was presented at the 2019 AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialists Conference in Portland, Maine in August:
  • J. Manni, J. McMahon, and N. Ahmed, “Addressing Varying Lighting Conditions with Application to Terrain Relative Navigation”.
• Congratulations to Aastha Acharya, Ofer Dagan, Shohei Wakayama, AES M.S. graduate Ben Mellinkoff (from Prof. Jack Burns’ lab at CU Boulder) and AES Ph.D. student Ian Elliot (from Prof. Natasaha Bosanac’s lab at CU Boulder) for each getting their first-author papers accepted to the upcoming 2020 AIAA InfoTech Conference in January!
• Finally, the COHRINT lab has moved to the new Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building on East Campus — check out more about the new building here: https://www.colorado.edu/engineering/aero-building

The following new research publications have been accepted:

-S. McGuire, P.M. Furlong, T. Fong, C. Heckman, D.J. Szafir, S. Julier, and N.
Ahmed, “Everybody Needs Somebody Sometimes: Validation of Adaptive Recovery in
Robotic Space Operations,”  accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and ICRA 2019 — congratulations, Steve!

-J. Stechschulte, N. Ahmed, and C. Heckman, “Low-overlap 3-D point
cloud registration with Bayesian outlier rejection,” accepted to ICRA 2019 — congratulations, John (from Prof. Chris Heckman’s ARPG research group)!

-B. Israelsen and N. Ahmed, “‘Dave…I can assure you…it’s going to be alright…’:
A definition, case for, and survey of algorithmic assurances in human-autonomy trust
relationships,” ACM Computing Surveys, v.51 no.6, Jan 2019, 113:1-113:37 — congratulations, Brett!

-B. Israelsen, N. Ahmed, E. Frew, D. Lawrence, and B. Argrow, “Machine Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems via Meta-Analysis of Decision Processes,” accepted to the 2019 Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference (AHFE 2019) — congratulations, Brett!

Masters student Jeremy Muesing’s paper “Fully Bayesian Human-Machine Data Fusion for Robust Dynamic Target Surveillance and Characterization” (co-authors: Luke Burks; Michael Iuzzolino; Danielle Szafir; Nisar Ahmed) has been accepted to the 2019 InfoTech@Aerospace Conference at AIAA SciTech Forum in San Diego — congratulations, Jeremy!

Aerospace student Luke Burks has successfully passed the comprehensive exam for his thesis, “Active Collaborative Sensing, Learning, and Planning in Human-Robot Teams”, and is now officially a PhD candidate — congratulations, Luke!

The COHRINT Lab will present 3 new papers at international conferences this summer :

“Flexible Semantic Human-Robot Sensing in Unknown Environments using Dynamic Information Gathering Policies,” by L. Burks and N. Ahmed (2018 ICRA RT-DUNE Workshop, Brisbane, Australia);

“Closed-loop Bayesian Semantic Data Fusion for Collaborative Human-Autonomy Target Search,” by L. Burks, I. Loefgren, L. Barbier, J. Muesing, J. McGinley, S. Vunnam, and N.Ahmed (FUSION 2018, Cambridge, UK);

“Weak in the NEES?: Auto-tuning Kalman Filters with Bayesian Optimization,” by Z. Chen, C. Heckman, S. Julier, and N. Ahmed (FUSION 2018, Cambridge, UK);

Aero PhD student Jonathan Manni was recently awarded a Draper Fellowship, among the first ever cohort of CU students to be named Draper Fellows — congratulations, Jonathan!

Aero PhD student Steve McGuire passed his Aerospace PhD Comprehensive Exam, and is now officially a PhD candidate — congratulations, Steve! 

PhD student Brett Israelsen has passed his PhD Comprehensive Exam in Computer Science, and is now officially a PhD candidate — congratulations, Brett! 

PhD student Luke Burks’ submission, “Optimal Continuous State POMDP Planning with Semantic Observations”, has been accepted to and will appear in the 2017 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Melbourne, Australia this December — congratulations Luke!

PhD student Luke Burks’ work on “Optimal Continuous State Planning with Semantic Observations” will appear at the 2017 Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision-Making in Ann Arbor, MI this June.