ME Chair's Distinguished Industry Lecture - Fall 2022 We are pleased to welcome James McLurkin, a Sr. Hardware Engineer at Google, for a UW ME seminar on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022 at 4 pm PT. This seminar is part of the ME Graduate Seminar Series and ME Chair's Distinguished Industry Lecture Series. All talks are free and open to the public. ME students and alumni are encouraged to attend. Title: Building Multi-Robot Systems, Deploying On-Device Machine Learning, and Using State-Space Control for Career Planning: Retrospectives from 25 Years of Engineering Abstract: Act 1: Multi-robot systems can solve many practical applications faster, cheaper, and in fundamentally different ways than individual robots. This requires distributed algorithms, and a whole lot of really cheap little robots. This act shows a few examples of how fancy algorithms work on simple robot hardware. Act 2: Artificial Intelligence lets us build smart devices that can solve real-world problems. But this requires AI on real-world devices. In this act I describe work from Google Research to get AI out of the cloud and onto a device near you. This requires new technology, but can provide a quadfecta of advantages: speed, accuracy, privacy and security. Act 3: Grad students work very hard to build the career that they want. But be careful, "May you get what you wish for" is an ancient curse for a reason. As I look back over 25 years of engineering, some of my biggest career problems were caused by me getting exactly what I wanted, not what I needed. In this act, I'll share some stories covering good, bad, and ugly moments in my career, and offer some advice on career planning couched in the language of State-Space control systems. Bio: James McLurkin is a Sr. Hardware Engineer at Google. He is one of the leads on the Google "Coral" Project, where he designs Artificial Intelligence hardware for users so that they can build their own awesome AI-powered projects. But his top-secret plan for global change is to build things that help build more engineers. He is a recovering academic; as an Assistant Professor at Rice University he worked on distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems, which is software that produces complex group behaviors from the interactions of many simple robots. Previously, McLurkin was a Lead Research Scientist at iRobot, and was the 2003 recipient of the Lemelson-MIT student prize for invention. He holds a S.B. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T., a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and a S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. |