Gregory Dudek (S’87-M’91-SM’14) is a Distinguished James McGill Professor with the School of Computer and an Associate member of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at McGill University. He is a VP Research for Samsung Electronics. He was the Director of the McGill School of Computer Science. Since 2012 he has been the Scientific Director of the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network (NCFRN). He is former Director of McGill’s Research Center for Intelligent Machines, a 25 year old inter-faculty research facility. His accolades include the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Award for Research Excellence and also for Service to the Research Community and also an IEEE Gold Medal (2017). He holds a PhD in computer science (computational vision) from the University of Toronto.

He has authored and co-authored over 300 research publications on subjects including visual object description, recognition, RF localization, robotic navigation and mapping, 5G telecommunications, and biological perception.

IEEE ACTIVITIES:

COMMITTEES/BOARDS:

• AdCom 2019-2022 (ex-officio)

SECTIONS/CHAPTERS:

• Montreal

CONFERENCES:

• Co-Chair, RSS Workshop on Visual Learning and Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation, 2020.
• General Chair, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2019.
• Program Committee member, IEEE International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017.
• Area Chair, Computer and Robot Vision (CRV), 2017.
• Robotics Science and Systems, Advisory Board member, 2011-2016.
• Program Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015.
• Robotics Science and Systems, Program Committee, 2009,2008,2012.
• Guest Co-Editor, International Journal of Robotics Research, Volume 33 Issue 4, 2014.
• General and PC Co-Chair, 13th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, ISER 2012, June, 2012.
• North American Program Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS), 2010.
• Program Committee member, Awards Chair, etc: ICRA, IROS, CVPR
• Program Committee member, Awards Chair, General Chair for non-IEEE meetings including: ISER, Computer and Robot Vision, ICPR, AAAI, etc.

QUALIFICATIONS:

I have conducted my own research, served on government granting panels in North America and Europe, developed and managed academic programs, worked for non-governmental organizations and worked for robotics-oriented companies. In doing that, I have been exposed to RAS and the IEEE from many viewpoints, including as an administrator, organizer and sponsor.

As Professor at McGill University, I have been involved in developing the robotics community for many years in several capacities, both in terms of research exposure and pedagogy. In addition to developing my own research program, mentoring my own students, and publishing hundreds of papers on various topics in robotics, I have invested a major part of my career in building our community at all scales, from within my own university as well as for the global research community. Seeing the way research is conducted, disseminated, and exploited is different situations and on different continents (e.g. North America, Europe and Asia) has given me a good perspective. For example, I sat on European Horizon 2020 funding councils, it was a markedly different style from what is often seen in North America. The needs and expectations from RAS for a large company are quite different from what our academic members seek.

For the last 12 years I have severed as Scientific Director and Lead PI for the NSERC Canadian Robotics Network (and its predecessor the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network) a national research network which supported robotics research in Canada and linked over a dozen universities and many more companies interested in developing robotics solutions. For a prior decade I served as president of CIPPRS, the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (a branch of ICPR) where I helped develop the conference “Computer and Robot Vision” (now the “Conference on Robotics and Vision”) that serves as the only Canadian-based forum (on IEEE Xplore) for robotics research.

I also acted a Director of McGill’s Center for Intelligent Machines, and as Director (i.e. Department Chair) for McGill’s School of Computer Science where for 8 years I helped develop the Vision, AI and Robotics research portfolio. I founded the company Independent Robotics Inc, a successful company that specializes in marine autonomy. I also founded and served as VP and Lab head at the Samsung AI Center in Montreal, where I have served as lab head for 5 years. In these roles, I managed budgets of many tens of millions of dollars and oversaw the annual activities of hundreds of graduate students and thousands of undergraduates.

MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

• As General Chair of ICRA 2019, we exceeded prior attendance numbers, introduced the 6+N page quota for papers (with Javdev Desai and Venkat Krovi), returned a healthy but non-excessive budget surplus and won the IEEE ICON award for the best IEEE conference of the year.
• As President of CIPPRS (above) I converted a pre-existing small vision conference (Vision Interface) into a venue for robotics as well as computer vision, now listed on IEEE Xplore. This conference serves as a venue to link researchers, especially graduate students working at the intersection of robotics, AI , computer vision and computer graphics.
• I continue to serve as founder, Lead PI and Director of the NSERC Canadian Robotics Network an organization to fund graduate students in robotics, support equipment and travel by academics across roughly a dozen universities and provide academic-industrial cooperation across roughly 20 companies.
• For the last 21 years I have organized an annual marine robotics research field mission/workshop at the Bellairs Research Institute in the Caribbean that brings researchers from several countries together for a combination of academic talks in a workshop format, and intensive field testing and development. The attendees at this workshop have become faculty at many top universities and taken positions at top technology companies. Over time, I have also taken a seat at this non- profit Institute as a board member, with a mandate to encourage and nurture new research in robotics as well as other disciplines including marine biology.
• Over the years I have served numerous roles in IEEE organizations, as well as activities sponsored by the ACM, the ICPR and other professional societies. This has included acting as associate editor, general chair, program chair or co-chair, program committee member, industrial liaison member, publicity chair, and other roles. The one role I avoided was finance chair, since I have had more than enough of that experience in my academic and industrial positions.

POSITION STATEMENT:

Let me start simply: I love robotics, I love our community, and I have devoted my career to helping it grow. I grew up with the classical vision of a robotic future, and have worked as an individual contributor, an academic administrator, a robotics startup company founder, and a multinational corporate conglomerate VP, all to bring that vision to fruition. I have had some fantastic successes and seen a few failures, so I have a sense for what works and what doesn’t. If I can help our community realize the robotics world of the future, it would be my privilege. At this stage of my career, I don’t need to prove myself, but rather want to develop the world of the future not for myself, but for my students, my colleagues, and humanity (OK, and for myself too, I admit it).

The fundamental role of RAS is to foster the development and dissemination of knowledge, but some of the mechanisms we have used are having, or will have, difficulty scaling to the level of success we have had. I look forward to helping our community, through RAS, adapt to rapid change, continuing volatility, and a host of associated challenges that are the byproduct of our own successes. These including increasing engagement, a growing rate of progress and publication, increased practical relevance and also socio-economic disruption and geopolitical strife in which robotics will be implicated.

This implies growing our existing mechanisms to support our community and facilitate the publication process. Our publication and dissemination mechanisms have been fantastically successful, but they are clearly facing challenges from new ways of getting the word out, and our society, as well as IEEE as a whole, needs to adapt rapidly.

The next few years are going to be spectacularly exciting for the robotics community, as we are passing a critical threshold in terms of technological capacity and synergy with AI and allied fields. During my career I have seen robotics mature from an esoteric domain with limited practical feasibly to a domain where exciting robust robots can exhibit astounding capabilities, and with a mature body of theory supporting it. Despite that recent progress, the next five years promises to be far more tumultuous and exciting but will mean that RAS will need to be vibrant and open to an expanding mission.

Some of the directions in which I would like to see RAS develop include: (1) supporting the development of robotics and AI as first-rank academic disciplines with their own academic structures, (2) supporting novel publication and validation mechanisms that embrace the vibrance of open-access while still providing the traditional vetted quality control and exposure associated with our branch of the IEEE, (3) finding ways to support the kinds of networking venues we have used so well while also accommodating the growing size of the community, (4) supporting and embracing the diversity of the community as it grows beyond traditional cultural, gender and geographic boundaries, (5) finding better ways to bridge between academics research and industrial engagement and exploitation to the mutual benefit of both sides of the traditional “valley of death’ between research and industry.

This is our time. Through the RAS AdCom, I would like to help us realize it.