David Vanden Bout

Dean of the College of Natural Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin

David Vanden Bout is dean of the College of Natural Sciences and has served in the college’s administrative leadership since 2013. With research expenditures in excess of $110 million, the college spans campuses across Texas, including the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas and the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis. He is the winner of multiple research, teaching and leadership awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Cottrell Scholar Award, a Research Innovation Award, a President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, a UT Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the Precursor’s President’s Award and GlobalMindED’s Inclusive Leader Award.  

Vanden Bout earned his B.S. in chemistry from Duke University in 1990 and a Ph.D in chemical physics in 1995 from The University of Texas at Austin. He went on to work as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Paul Barbara’s laboratory at the University of Minnesota. He started as an assistant professor in the then-Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin in 1997. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2003 and the rank of full professor in 2013. He became the associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Natural Sciences in 2014 and senior associate dean in 2019.  

Speakers to be announced soon

Speakers to be announced soon

Roberto Martin-Martin

Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Austin 

Roberto Martin-Martin is assistant professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. His research connects robotics, computer vision and machine learning. He studies and develops novel AI algorithms that enable robots to perform tasks in human uncontrolled environments such as homes and offices. In that endeavor, he creates novel decision-making solutions based on reinforcement learning, imitation learning, planning and control, and explores topics in robot perception such as pose estimation and tracking, video prediction and parsing. Martin-Martin received his Ph.D. from the Berlin Institute of Technology (TUB) prior to a postdoctoral position at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese. His work has been selected as RSS Best Systems Paper Award, RSS Pioneer, Winner of the Amazon Picking Challenge, and ICRA Best Paper, RSS and IROS Best Paper Nominee. He is chair of the IEEE Technical Committee in Mobile Manipulation.  

Luis Sentis (Moderator)

UT Austin Associate Professor & Co-Founder, Apptronik Systems  

Luis Sentis is the general dynamics associate professor in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a co-founder of the robotics company Apptronik Systems. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was a La Caixa Foundation Fellow. Sentis leads the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, an experimental facility focusing on high-performance control, embodiment and intelligence of humanoid robots as well as strength augmentation exoskeletons. He publishes and teaches in areas related to real-time decision and control of human-centered robots, hardware design of high-performance humanoid robots, and safety capabilities for mobile humanoid robots.

Elliott Hauser

UT Austin Assistant Professor & CEO, Trinket 

Elliott Hauser (he/him/his) studies the ways information systems condition social reality. His work focuses on sites and situations where actions are taken in light of information. Hauser has investigated the computational production of time, the documentary production of scientific facts and conceptions of temporality in data science education. His current research program examines robotics as a site of human and non-human action in light of information. He is co-lead of Living and Working With Robots, an eleven PI collaboration across seven disciplines to deploy and study robots on the UT Austin campus using sociotechnical methods. Hauser holds a PhD in information science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Royster Society of Fellows. 

Peter Stone

Associate Department Chair & Director of Texas Robotics, The University of Texas at Austin  

Peter Stone is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as associate department chair and director of Texas Robotics. He was a co-founder of Cogitai, Inc. and is now Chief Scientist of Sony AI.  

Stone’s main research interest in AI is understanding how we can best create complete intelligent agents. He considers adaptation, interaction and embodiment to be essential capabilities of such agents. Thus, his research focuses mainly on machine learning, multiagent systems and robotics. To him, the most exciting research topics are those inspired by challenging real-world problems. He believes that complete successful research includes both precise, novel algorithms and fully implemented and rigorously evaluated applications. Stone’s application domains have included robot soccer, autonomous bidding agents, autonomous vehicles and human-interactive agents.

Speaker to be announced soon