Benjamin Joffe

Benjamin Joffe

Benjamin Joffe is a Research Scientist in the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. His work is at the intersection of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Robotics. His research interests include 3D Perception for highly-variable and deformable objects; robot learning for manipulation tasks; real-world generalization from synthetic and multi-modal data; Machine Learning for chemical sensing and biomanufacturing; Deep Learning algorithms for novel modalities and low-data scenarios. 

Research Scientist II
Phone
404.407.8848
Office
Food Processing Technology Building
Additional Research
3D PerceptionAgricultural RoboticsComputer VisionMachine Learning for Chemical & Bio SensingRobot LearningRobotic Manipulation
Research Focus Areas
IRI And Role
GTRI
Geogia Tech Research Institute > Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory

Chen Zhou

Chen Zhou

Chen Zhou is the associate chair for undergraduate studies and associate professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.. Dr. Zhou's research focus includes sustainable supply chain, distribution system design and manufacturing systems. Dr. Chen is a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, Society of Manufacturing Engineers and American Society of Engineering Education. Dr. Zhou received a B.S. degree from Tianjin University (China) in 1982, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1988.

Associate Professor; School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies; School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Phone
404.894.2326
Office
Groseclose 217
Additional Research
Warehousing design and analysis; Manufacturing Systems
Research Focus Areas
IRI And Role

Ye Zhao

Ye Zhao

Dr. Ye Zhao started as an Assistant Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in January 2019. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and obtained his Ph.D. from UT Austin, where he worked on robust motion planning and decision-making for robot manipulation and locomotion problems with frictional contact behaviors. At Georgia Tech, he directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots. His research interests lie broadly in planning, control, decision-making, and learning algorithms of highly agile, contact-rich, and human-cooperative robots. Dr. Zhao is especially interested in computationally efficient optimization algorithms and formal methods for challenging robotics problems with formal guarantees on robustness, safety, autonomy, and real-time performance. The LIDAR group aims at pushing the boundary of robot autonomy, intelligent decision, robust motion planning, and symbolic planning. The long-term goal is to devise theoretical and algorithmic underpinnings for collaborative humanoid and mobile robots operating in unstructured and unpredictable environments while working alongside humans. Robotic applications primarily focus on agile bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion, manipulation, heterogeneous robot teaming, and mobile platforms for extreme environment maneuvering.

Assistant Professor; School of Mechanical Engineering
Phone
404.894.3061
Office
GTMI 437
Additional Research
Robotics; Formal Methods; Optimization; Robust Motion Planning; Control
Research Focus Areas
IRI And Role

Fumin Zhang

Fumin Zhang

Dr. Fumin Zhang joined Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007 as an assistant professor. He received a Ph.D. degree in 2004 from the University of Maryland (College Park) in Electrical Engineering, and held a postdoctoral position in Princeton University from 2004 to 2007. His B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in electrical engineering, are from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Fumin Zhang's research focuses on mobile sensor networks that demonstrate bio-inspired long duration autonomy. He has contributed to the co-design of control, sensing, and communication algorithms for mobile sensing agents that collect information to model spatial temporal stochastic fields. An application domain of his research has been marine robots for environmental sensing and data collection. He has established a theoretical framework for the investigation of battery supported Cyber-Physical Systems. He also developed a co-design methodology for real-time scheduling, realtime control, and battery management. He is currently serving as the co-chair for the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Marine Robotics and is the associate editor for IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems. He also serves as the deputy editor-in-chief for the Cyber-Physical Systems Journal.

Professor; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Phone
404.385.2751
Office
TSRB 406
Additional Research
Mobile Sensor Networks; Underwater and Marine Robotics; Motion Planning in Complex Environments; Battery Supported Cyber-Physical Systems; Geometric and Nonlinear Systems and Control
Research Focus Areas
IRI And Role

Fan Zhang

Fan Zhang

Dr. Fan Zhang received her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering and M.S. in Statistics from UTK in 2019. She is the recipient of the 2021 Ted Quinn Early Career Award from the American Nuclear Society and joined the Woodruff School in July, 2021. She is actively involved with multiple international collaborations on improving nuclear cybersecurity through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the DOE Office of International Nuclear Security (INS). Dr. Zhang’s research primarily focuses on the cybersecurity of nuclear facilities, online monitoring & fault detection using data analytics methods, instrumentation & control, and nuclear systems modeling & simulation. She has developed multiple testbeds using both simulators and physical components to investigate different aspects of cybersecurity as well as process health management.

Assistant Professor; School of Mechanical Engineering
Phone
404.894.5735
Office
Boggs 371
Additional Research
Research interests include instrumentation & control, autonomous control, cybersecurity, online monitoring, fault detection, prognostics, risk assessment, nuclear system simulation, data-driven models, and artificial intelligence applications.  
IRI And Role

Alenka Zajić

Alenka Zajić

Alenka Zajic is currently the Ken Byers Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia, in 2001 and 2003, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2008. Before joining Georgia Tech as an assistant professor, Dr. Zaji_ was a post-doctoral fellow in the Naval Research Laboratory and visiting faculty in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Zaji_ is the recipient of the following awards: IEEE Atlanta Section Outstanding Engineer Award (2019), The Best Poster Award at the IEEE International Conference on RFID (2018), NSF CAREER Award (2017), Best Paper Award at the 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (2016), the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Communications and Electronics (2014), Neal Shepherd Memorial Best Propagation Paper Award (2012), the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Telecommunications (2008), the Best Student Paper Award at the Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (2007), IEEE Outstanding Chapter Award as a Chair of the Atlanta Chapter of the AP/MTT Societies (2016), LexisNexis Dean's Excellence Award (2016), and Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award (2016). She was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications 2012-2017 and an executive editor for Wiley Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2011-2016 .

Ken Byers Professor; School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Phone
404.556.7149
Office
TSRB 415
Additional Research
On-Chip and Off-Chip Interconnects and Communication in Computer Systems; Mobile-to-Mobile Wireless Channel Modeling and Measurements; Underwater Wireless Channel Modeling and Measurements; Electromagnetic Security and Compatibility; Applied Electromagnetics; Wireless Communications

Aaron Young

Aaron Young

Aaron Young is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and is interested in designing and improving powered orthotic and prosthetic control systems for persons with stroke, neurological injury or amputation. His previous experience includes a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Human Neuromechanics Lab working with exoskeletons and powered orthoses to augment human performance. He has also worked on the control of upper and lower limb prostheses at the Center for Bionic Medicine (CBM) at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. His master's work at CBM focused on the use of pattern recognition systems using myoelectric (EMG) signals to control upper limb prostheses. His dissertation work at CBM focused on sensory fusion of mechanical and EMG signals to enable an intent recognition system for powered lower limb prostheses for use by persons with a transfemoral amputation.

Associate Professor; School of Mechanical Engineering
Director; EPIC Lab
Phone
404.385.5306
Office
GTMI 433
Additional Research
Powered prosthesis; EMG signal processing. Young's research is focused on developing control systems to improve prosthetic and orthotic systems. His research is aimed at developing clinically translatable research that can be deployed on research and commercial systems in the near future. Some of the interesting research questions are how to successfully extract user intent from human subjects and how to use these signals to allow for accurate intent identification. Once the user intent is identified, smart control systems are needed to maximally enable individuals to accomplish useful tasks. For lower limb devices, these tasks might include standing from a seated position, walking, or climbing a stair. We hope to improve clinically relevant measures with powered mechatronic devices, including reducing metabolic cost, improving biomechanics and decreasing the time required to perform daily tasks of living.

Anthony Yezzi

Anthony Yezzi

Professor Yezzi was born in Gainsville, Florida and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He obtained both his Bachelor's degree and his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota with minors in mathematics and music. After completing his Ph.D., he continued his research as a post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. His research interests fall broadly within the fields of image processing and computer vision. In particular he is interested in curve and surface evolution theory and partial differential equation techniques as they apply to topics within these fields (such as segmentation, image smoothing and enhancement, optical flow, stereo disparity, shape from shading, object recognition, and visual tracking). Much of Dr. Yezzi's work is particularly tailored to problems in medical imaging, including cardiac ultrasound, MRI, and CT. He joined the Georgia Tech faculty in the fall of 1999 where he has taught courses in DSP and is working to develop advanced courses in computer vision and medical image processing. Professor Yezzi consults with industry in the areas of visual inspection and medical imaging. His hobbies include classical guitar, opera, and martial arts.

Julian T. Hightower Chair; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Professor; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Phone
404.385.1017
Office
TSRB 427
Additional Research
Computer Vision; Image Processing; Shape Optimization; Geometric PDE's
Research Focus Areas
IRI And Role

W. Hong Yeo

W. Hong Yeo

W. Hong Yeo is a TEDx alumnus and biomechanical engineer. Since 2017, Yeo is an assistant professor of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Program Faculty in Bioengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before joining Georgia Tech, he has worked at Virginia Commonwealth University Medicine and Engineering as an assistant professor from 2014-2016. Yeo received his BS in mechanical engineering from INHA University, South Korea in 2003 and he received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and genome sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2011. From 2011-2013, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Beckman Institute and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the fundamental and applied aspects of nanomechanics, biomolecular interactions, soft materials, and nano-microfabrication for nanoparticle biosensing and unusual electronic system development, with an emphasis on bio-interfaced translational nanoengineering. is an Editorial Board Member of Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) and Scientific Pages of Bioengineering, and Review Editor of Frontiers of Materials (Frontiers Publishing Group). He serves as a technical committee member for IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference and Korea Technology Advisory Group at Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology. He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, and has three issued and more than five pending patents. His research has been funded by MEDARVA Foundation, Thomas F. and Kate Miller Jeffress Memorial Trust, CooperVision, Inc., Korea Institute of Materials Science, Commonwealth Research Commercialization, and State Council of Virginia. Yeo is a recipient of a number of awards, including BMES Innovation and Career Development Award, Virginia Commercialization Award, Blavatnik Award Nominee, NSF Summer Institute Fellowship, Notable Korean Scientist Awards, and Best Paper/Poster Awards at ASME conferences.

Associate Professor; School of Mechanical Engineering
Faculty; Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
IMat Initiative Lead | Materials for Biomedical Systems
Phone
404.385.5710
Office
Pettit 204
Additional Research
Human-machine interface; hybrid materials; bio-MEMS; Soft robotics. Flexible Electronics; Human-machine interface; hybrid materials; Electronic Systems, Devices, Components, & Packaging; bio-MEMS; Soft robotics. Yeo's research in the field of biomedical science and bioengineering focuses on the fundamental and applied aspects of biomolecular interactions, soft materials, and nano-microfabrication for the development of nano-biosensors and soft bioelectronics.

Danfei Xu

Danfei Xu

Dr. Danfei Xu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. Xu received a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2015 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2021. His research goal is to enable physical autonomy in everyday human environments with minimum expert intervention. Towards this goal, his work draws equally from Robotics, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision, including topics such as imitation & reinforcement learning, representation learning, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. His current research focuses on visuomotor skill learning, structured world models for long-horizon planning, and data-driven approaches to human-robot collaboration.

Assistant Professor; School of Interactive Computing
Additional Research
Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision
Research Focus Areas
IRI And Role