INNA SHARF, Canada

Inna Sharf (S’89-M’90) Dr. Inna Sharf is currently a full professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She received her B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science, specializing in Aerospace option, from the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD at the Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto and in January 1991, joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Victoria (UVic) as an Assistant Professor and holder of the NSERC’s Women’s Faculty Award. Sharf’s research activities at that time were focused on the dynamics and modeling of space manipulators, such as Canadarm. In the ten years at UVic, she collaborated with several industries, most notably, with MDA (former Spar Aerospace). In 2001, Sharf relocated to McGill where she took up a position as Associate Professor. At McGill, Sharf founded the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory, initially dedicated to studying robotic grasping of satellites and debris in space. Since its inception in 2003, the research in the lab expanded to include problems in control, motion planning and state estimation for autonomous robotic systems, specifically, unmanned aerial vehicles, legged and mobile robots. Sharf is presently participating in the NSERC Canadian Robotics Network (NCRN) where she is contributing through the development of autonomy for timber-harvesting machines and small rotary UAVs. Sharf has published over 150 conference and journal papers on her academic research, many of these in IEEE societal publications. She teaches courses in the areas of mechanics, systems and controls and robotics. She is an associate fellow of AIAA and a member of IEEE and ASME.

IEEE ACTIVITIES:

• Regular reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, ICRA, IROS, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, over the past 25 years.
• ICRA 2019, Competitions co-chair
• Associate Editor for IROS 2021
• Co-chair of several sessions at ICRA/IROS over the past 15 years.

QUALIFICATIONS:

I have been a member of IEEE since my graduate student days, joining the society to attend my first ICRA in 1988. Although I have not had any service appointments directly with IEEE or IEEE-RAS, I believe I have other qualifications to make me suitable for this position. I have held numerous administrative and service positions in my department, faculty, University and for profession at large. These range from serving on Tenure and Promotions committees, chairing the graduate admissions committee, serving as a disciplinary officer for the faculty, serving as Associate Editor for two journals, etc. One particular example of service to my department I want to highlight is as a chair of the Advisory Faculty Search Committee in 2017 and in 2019. In these years, I led two faculty searches, respectively, to fill a total of 5 faculty positions in my department. My goal for these searches was to attract and hire excellent women candidates for all positions. Indeed, I almost succeeded: in the first search, for all three faculty positions, women were hired and in the second search, one out of two positions was filled by a woman candidate. This was an unprecedented faculty search outcome for my department and in fact, for my faculty, and it was no easy feat. It required a huge amount of effort on my part: both in terms of finding and encouraging high-caliber women candidates to apply for our positions as well as to deal with internal resistance to how I conducted the search.

One other example of my past experience which I believe will be helpful to my service on AdCom of RAS is my work in the role of Acting Director of NCRN (NSERC Canadian Robotics Network). I undertook this role about six months after the network officially started, when the Director/PI took a leave from McGill to work in industry. I was pretty much thrown in the position: the previous network manager had left; the network had to get rolling as not much happened in the first six months; there were issues with some of the industrial partners in the network, etc. I took full ownership of the network by setting the tone, initiating the regular network activities and introducing new ones, in other words, getting the network working. I am proud of what I accomplished in my year as Acting Director of NCRN and am thankful for the opportunity to have served in that role.

In all, I am strongly committed to service and will work hard for IEEE RAS to advance the society’s mission, the Robotics and Automation discipline and any specific tasks and objectives that need to be fulfilled.

Position Statement: There are several things that I feel strongly about and I would like to pursue them if I am elected to serve.

Ethics in Publishing and Reproducibility of Results: IEEE RAS sponsors and co-sponsors numerous conferences and oversees publication of several journals. It has become an established trend in robotics publishing to present one’s best results, mainly to ensure the publication of the work by showing that the authors’ results are superior to others in literature. I would like to see a more honest and less competitive publication framework where there is a stronger onus placed on the authors to present their work so that: 1) it is reproducible; 2) it presents an honest comparison to other solutions; 3) it presents not only successes but also failures, with appropriate analysis and discussion. I believe this will be a better way to serve the research community and ultimately allow for faster advances in the field, as well as knowledge transfer to industry. I would also like to see the society enforce more concrete guidelines for authorship of publications, for example, by requiring the authors to make a statement on their contribution to the work.

Innovation in RAS Conferences and Initiatives: The two society sponsored flagship conferences, ICRA and IROS, have witnessed a progressive growth in terms of numbers of papers submitted and conference attendance. The global pandemic forced our community to go online which created a drastic shift in how these conferences are run and organized, as well as the impact they have on the community. I would be interested in working with the society to undertake a critical evaluation of the outcomes from on-line conferences, to identify the benefits and disadvantages and to lay out a new roadmap for ICRA and IROS in the post-pandemic world. The pandemic presented us with opportunities to do things differently and we should take the best outcomes from the past two years and integrate them into the organization and execution of future conferences.

Increasing Participation and Visibility of Women Roboticists as well as Members of Other Underrepresented Groups: I believe strongly in promoting participation and advancement of women and other underrepresented groups at all levels of the community. The society has made huge advances in this regard already (the increased number of women serving on this committee alone is an excellent example), and it must continue to stay the course. I will participate actively in continuing promotion of women and other underrepresented groups in events organized by society, and in service to the society.

In summary, I will work towards improving the quality and impact of societal publications, towards innovation in society sponsored conferences in light of the pandemic experiences and, towards further promotion and inclusion of underrepresented groups in participation at all levels and initiatives of the society.