The second edition of NERC was held on Oct 6th at Harvard. We saw more than 200 people from 20 universities, and 18 companies. If you were one of the attendees, please make sure you fill the survey here.

Here is a summary article about the event, and a more Harvard-specific one here.

Overview

The Northeast Robotics Colloquium aims to bring together all of the many varieties of robotics practitioners in the northeastern United States, in an event that is simultaneously a research meeting, a networking and job-fair event, and a showcase for established and up-and-coming robotics companies. Ultimately, we hope to promote the kind of healthy and well-connected robotics community that will be essential in fueling the field's rapid growth in the coming decade.

Update: The program is here. The abstracts for posters and demos are also available.

Update: We are currently sold out, and are unable to take more registrations, sorry!

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Program

The colloquium is scheduled to be day-long starting at 9 AM and ending at 6 PM. It will feature four hour-long keynote talks, two interactive sessions with posters and demos from academia and industry, and two sponsor spotlight talks from our local sponsors.

09:00am - 09:45am	Registration
09:45am - 10:00am	Welcoming Remarks
10:00am - 11:00am	Invited Talk: John Leonard A Long-term View of SLAM
11:00am - 11:15am	Sponsor Spotlight: Jaybridge Robotics
11:15am - 12:15pm	Interactive Session: Posters & Industry Exhibits
12:15pm - 01:15pm	Invited Talk: Conor Walsh Next Generation Soft Wearable Robots
01:15pm - 02:15pm	Lunch (Provided)
02:15pm - 03:15pm	Invited Talk: Marc Raibert Dynamic Robots: Mobility, Speed and Dexterity
03:15pm - 03:30pm	Sponsor Spotlight: Wyss Institute
03:30pm - 04:30pm	Interactive Session: Posters & Industry Exhibits
04:30pm - 05:30pm	Invited Talk: Rob Howe Robot Hands for the Real World
05:30pm - 05:45pm	Concluding Remarks

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Getting To The Event

The colloquium will be held in the basement of the NorthWest building at Harvard University. The address is 52 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138. Travel directions (both driving and public transport) as well as parking information can be found here.
http://sysbio.harvard.edu/csb/contact/visitor.html

The entrance will be through the doors on the south-west corner of the building towards Oxford St. All the other doors are expected to be closed during the weekend. On entry through these doors, use the stairs to go down to the basement and the registration desk should be right in front of you.

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Call for Posters/Demos

Apart from the invited talks, the colloquium will feature an extensive poster/demo session intended to foster discussion on the recent developments in robotics from both academia and industry. This is a great opportunity for you to show off your ongoing work, get the word out, as well as solicit feedback. Last year, we featured posters from academia and demos from the industy. Due to the overwhelming success of the interactive sessions, we are inviting posters/demos from both academia and industry this year.

We solicit a 1-page abstract proposal for demos and posters. Guidelines for submissions:

• Make sure that the author list, affiliations, and contact information are clear in the submission.
• Please use poster- as a prefix for the file name for poster submissions, and demo- as a prefix for the file name for demo submissions.
• All submissions should be in PDF format.
• If you want to re-submit a submission, use the same filename as first submission with a -2 suffix.

  Poster/Demo abstract upload

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Invited Speakers

		Prof. Robert Howe is Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering in the school of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He founded the BioRobotics Laboratory in 1990, which investigates the roles of sensing and mechanical design in motor control, both in humans and in robots. His research interests focus on robot and human manipulation and the sense of touch. Biomedical applications of this work include the development of robotic and image-guided approaches to minimally invasive surgical procedures. Dr. Howe earned a bachelors degree in physics from Reed College, then worked as a design engineer in the electronics industry in Silicon Valley. He received a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1990, and then joined the faculty at Harvard.
John J. Leonard is Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation, mapping, and persistent autonomy for autonomous mobile robots. He holds the degrees of B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (1994). He is the recipient of a Thouron Award (1987), an NSF Career Award (1998), a Science Foundation Ireland E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award (2004), the Best Paper Award at ACM SenSys in 2004 (shared with D. Moore, D. Rus, and S. Teller), the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE ICRA 2005 (with R. Eustice and H. Singh) and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award in 2006 (shared with R. Eustice and H. Singh).
		Marc Raibert is CTO and Founder of Boston Dynamics, a company that develops some of the world's most advanced dynamic robots, such as BigDog, Petman, Atlas, Cheetah, Urban Hopper and the AlphaDog. Before starting Boston Dynamics, Raibert was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT from 1986 to 1995 and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon from 1980 to 1986. While at MIT and Carnegie Mellon Raibert helped establish the scientific basis for dynamic legged robots. Raibert got a PhD from MIT in 1977. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Prof. Conor Walsh is Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also the founder of the Harvard Biodesign Lab, which brings together researchers from the engineering, industrial design, medical and business communities to develop smart medical devices and translate them to industrial partners in collaboration with the Wyss Institute's Advanced Technology Team. Dr. Walsh received his B.A.I and B.A. degrees in Mechanical and Manufacturing engineering from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, in 2003, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and 2010.

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Important Dates

We are currently sold out. Sorry, but we cannot register more people.
Poster/Demo Deadline	October 4th 2013 (Extended) Oct 1st, 2013.
Colloquium	October 6th 2013.

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Registration

There is a $50 ($20 for students) registration fee. As a unique feature of this colloquium, we offer registrants the option to upload their CV or resume, which will be visible to our event partners who are some of the leading robotics companies in the region.

Register

CV Upload

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Gold Sponsors

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Exhibitors and Sponsors

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Organizing Committee

Karthik Dantu, University of Buffalo.
Richard Moore, Harvard.
Kirstin Petersen, Harvard.
Yigit Menguc, Harvard.
Daniel Vogt, Harvard.

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NERC '13 Flyers

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