Speakers
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Anirudha Majumdar is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department at Princeton University. He also holds a part-time visiting research scientist position at Google DeepMind in Princeton. Majumdar received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, and a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2016 to 2017 at the Autonomous Systems Lab in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department. He is a recipient of the Sloan Fellowship, ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, the NSF CAREER award, the Google Faculty Research Award (twice), the Amazon
Research Award (twice), the Young Faculty Researcher Award from the Toyota Research Institute, the Paper of the Year Award from the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), the Best Conference Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the Alfred Rheinstein Faculty Award (Princeton), and the Excellence in Teaching Award (Princeton SEAS).
As someone whose excitement for engineering was piqued at an early age through countless hours spent with LEGO Mindstorms kits, I firmly believe that robotics is an ideal platform for getting students excited about STEM at an early stage. In this seminar, we will discuss how robotics might serve as a pathway for introducing students to elements of engineering design, physics, probability, statistics, and programming. We will also discuss how robotics can be used to explore topics of broader societal interest such as ethics (what should an autonomous car do if faced with two equally bad options?), the economy (how will automation affect jobs?), and the law (who is liable if an autonomous drone crashes on someone’s property?). Join us for a visit to
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department teaching/research labs and learn about our teaching efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels, where students learn through project-based assignments on drones.