November 2023 Update

The semester is coming to a close, and it may have been one of my busiest yet!

I submitted two papers in September to the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) happening in Yokohama, Japan. I am a lead author on one paper, and second on another in collaboration with a colleague in Professor Alyssa Pierson’s Collaborative Autonomy Group. More details to come upon acceptance! I also recently submitted my first journal paper as a first author to Wiley’s Advanced Intelligent Systems!

I attended two back-to-back conferences in late September going into early October. I first attended the 2023 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) in Orlando, Florida, a conference for supporting and celebrating women and non-binary individuals in technology. This was definitely the largest conference I’ve ever been to, with over 30,000 people in attendance, and I am grateful to the BU Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) and the Division of Systems Engineering for supporting my attendance and travel. I had the opportunity to listen to inspiring women including Tiffany Yu (Diversability) and Tunde Oyeneyin (Peloton), and connect with other women in tech. I also attended several workshops ranging from diversity, inclusion, and allyship to data science and autonomous racing.

I flew straight from GHC to the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Detroit, MI. I had the opportunity to present two papers accepted for this year’s proceedings for oral and poster presentations. I presented our collaborative navigation work in the Collision Avoidance session, in collaboration with Dawei Zhang and Roberto Tron, as well as our resource coverage work in the Multi-Robot and Distributed Robot Systems session. The keynote speakers Marcie O’Malley (Rice University) and Yuto Nakanishi (GITAI) were very inspiring! I also enjoyed seeing familiar faces and meeting fellow roboticists.

I also had the opportunity to attend the MassRobotics Inaugural Women in Robotics Gala with my colleagues in the BU Robotics Lab. I’m proud to say my advisor, Professor Alyssa Pierson, was awarded the Rising Star Award! It was a pleasure and an inspiration to see her honored, and to meet other inspiring women in robotics!