We NEED YOUR VOTE in the 2021 RAS Administrative Committee election!

Act NOW! The deadline to cast your vote as an RAS Member is Tuesday, 15 December! RAS members are voting to elect new RAS Administrative Committee members to serve 3-year terms beginning 1 January 2021. All RAS members (Graduate Student Members and above) have received voting instructions, the biographies, and statements of the candidates by email. RAS membership must be active as of 15 November 2020 to be eligible to vote. Members who do not have valid emails registered with the IEEE or have opted not to receive e-mail from IEEE, have received their election materials by post. Use https://eballot4.votenet.com/IEEE to access the ballot and cast your vote now. If you do not remember your password, you may retrieve it on the voter login page. Voting must be completed no later than 15 December 2020. Any returns received after this date will not be counted. The online voting site will close at 4:00 pm Eastern Time. Candidate bios and position statements are here: https://www.ieee-ras.org/about-ras/governance/election-candidates If you have any questions about the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society voting process, please contact [email protected] or +1 732-562-3904.

IEEE RAS Women in Robotics Panel Discussion-Watch now!

Did you miss the IEEE RAS Women in Robotics Panel Discussion from 11 November 2020? -Watch it now! 1 December 2020 at 1:00 pm EST (18:00 GMT) via Webex. Educators everywhere are reexamining and reinventing their teaching approach to meet the challenges of delivering a high-quality education in this unprecedented year. Many are revisiting established best practices while others are looking to new ways of reaching students. In robotics education, we are facing many difficult questions: How can we best engage students in robotics material in the current teaching environment? How can we overcome perceived limitations when teaching robotics content online, especially when hardware is involved? Where should robotics education research focus to address these issues head on? To facilitate a conversation around these important questions, the IEEE Women in Engineering – Robotics and Automation Society (WIE-RAS) hosted an online panel on best practices for teaching robotics. The diverse panel boasts experts in robotics education from a variety of disciplines, institutions, and areas of expertise: Carlotta Berry – Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, passionate about robotics education, increasing underrepresented populations in STEM, and enhanced human-robot interfaces Katie Driggs-Campbell – Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explores safe and interactive autonomous systems through modeling human behavior, designing robust decision and control frameworks, and developing multi-agent validation schemes Cecilia Laschi – Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore, interests are in biorobotics, soft robotics, humanoid robotics and neurorobotics. Iolanda Leite – Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, develops social robots that can capture, learn from, and respond appropriately to the subtle dynamics of real-world situations Karinne Ramirez-Amaro – Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, advances artificial intelligence and robotics research in semantic representations, decision making, and human activity recognition and understanding Panelists have taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from introductory robotics and applied programming to project-based design courses to specialized courses on human-centered robotics, autonomous decision-making, human perception for information technology, and intelligent robotics to name a few. Panelists share their experience in best practices for robotics education, provide strategies for applying these practices to new courses, discuss major challenges in online robotics education and how they have overcome them, and talk about where they see robotics education headed.