| Institution | Major Subject | Degree | Date | GPA | |
| Carnegie Mellon University | Robotics | Ph.D. | July 2002 (expected) | ||
| Lehigh University | Electrical Engineering | M.S. | May 1996 | 3.93 | |
| Lehigh University | Engineering Physics | B.S. | January 1995 | 3.75 | |
| Lehigh University | Electrical Engineering | B.S. | May 1994 | 3.73 |
| Autonomy and Robotics Area NASA Ames Research Center | RIACS Summer Student Research Program 2001 visitor. Worked on visual pose estimation, focusing on a maximally informative statistics framework for improving approximations in the Variable State Dimension Filter framework, and on reduction of algorithmic complexity. |
| Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University | Ph.D. Candidate. Thesis Advisor: Martial Hebert. Investigated visual landmark based position estimation for planetary rovers under a NASA GSRP Fellowship. Research included some work in detecting and tracking natural terrain features, and focused on statistics and recursive state estimation, incorporating concepts from structure from motion, robust estimation, Monte Carlo filtering, Kalman Filtering and related methods. |
| CMU/NASA HQ Allderdice High School FIRST Team #117 | Worked with a local area High School to compete in a national robotics competition. Acted as a mentor in the design, building, and programming of a robot to compete in regional and national competitions. |
| Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University | Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search Project Team. Calibrated camera and pan-tilt mechanism and developed algorithm to localize rock features on ice fields using monocular imaging and a flat ground assumption. Also helped to develop the Science Autonomy Architecture specification. |
| Intelligent MechanismsGroup, NASA Ames Research Center | Summer Intern. Worked on a monocular visual servoing system for the Marsokhod planetary rover. The rover was able to autonomously navigate towards a user-selected terrain feature. |
| NASA Goddard Space Flight Center |
Visiting Student Enrichment Program. Worked with Dr. Anil Deane. Studied time evolution of coherent structures on the solar surface using the Karhunen-Loeve transform (PCA) analysis of SOHO data. |
| Lehigh University EECS Department |
Research Assistant. Worked with Dr. Rick S. Blum. Developed adaptive technique for designing optimal fusion rules for distributed random signal detection systems. |
| Lehigh University EECS Department |
Senior Project. Developed a small microcontroller controlled, behavior based robot which was capable of traversing an indoor area and extinguishing burning candles. Responsible for hardware, software, and mechanism design |
| Lehigh University Department of Physics | Summer REU Program member. Worked with Dr. James D. Gunton. Wrote computer simulation to model spatiotemporal chaos present in the solutions to the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. |
| Lehigh University Department of Physics | Quantum Optics lab Work-study. Worked with Dr. John Huennekens. Set up and ran a high temperature Cesium oven and optics to study molecular Cs2 spectroscopically. |
M. C. Deans and M. Hebert, "Experimental comparison of techniques for localization and mapping using a bearing-only sensor", to appear in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, December 2000.
M. C. Deans and M. Hebert, "Invariant Filtering for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping," Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2000.
R. Blum, M. C. Deans, "Distributed Random Signal Detection with Multibit Sensor Decisions," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp 516-524 (1998).
M. C. Deans, An Adaptive Algorithm for Distributed Detection System Design, Lehigh University Master's Thesis, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, 1996.
M. C. Deans, R. S. Blum, "An Adaptive Algorithm for Distributed Detection System Design," Sensor Fusion and Networked Robotics VII, Proceedings of the SPIE 2589, pp 172-179 (1995).
K. R. Elder, Hao-Wen Xi, M. Deans, J. D. Gunton, "Spatiotemporal Chaos in the Damped Kuramoto-Sivashinsky Equation,", p. 702 in AIP Conference Proceedings 342, CAM-94 Physics, Cancun, Mexico 1994, Arnulfo Zepeda (Ed.) AIP Press 1995.