Timothy Granger Atkeson
Timothy Granger AtkesonAge 53, died on December 26, 2010 in Denver, CO. Born October 30, 1957 in Washington, DC. Tim was a graduate of St. Albans School (1975), received his bachelors degree from Harvard University (1979), and his law degree from Yale Law School (1982). He began his career in DC as a law clerk for Judge Abner Mikva in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Tim then moved to Denver to be the Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Richard D. Lamm in 1983, which then led him to run for the Colorado Legislature for House District 3 in 1986. Tim also spent a year in the Office of the Denver District Attorney as Deputy District Attorney before finding a home as a partner at Arnold & Porter LLC. Aside from his career in politics and law, Tim also felt passionate about the community in which he lived. He spent 2 years as President on the board of the Colorado Federation for the Arts, was a member of the Regional Air Quality Council, Vice-Chair of the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission, and also participated on the board of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. Tim was a trustee on the board of Graland Country Day School, but most dear to his heart was the time that he spent as a trustee on the board of the Denver Zoological Foundation, where he received the honor of Trustee Emeritus. Tim is survived by his wife, Barbara, and his 5 children, Ellie, Granger, Paula, Ulysses, and Winslow. He is also survived by his mother Paula Atkeson, his 7 siblings, and their families. In lieu of flowers, donations suggested to the Denver Zoological Society. Published in Denver Post on December 28, 2010 I am currently looking for graduate students who are interested in helping us get humanoid robots to behave with agility. General approaches are described here and some papers on walking are here.
Potential PhD students need to be admitted to a CMU PhD program before I can take them on as students. Most of my students are in the Robotics Institute PhD Program.
My life goal is to fulfill the science fiction vision of machines that achieve human levels of competence in perceiving, thinking, and acting. A more narrow technical goal is to understand how to get machines to generate and perceive human behavior. I use two complementary approaches, exploring humanoid robotics and human aware environments. Building humanoid robots tests our understanding of how to generate human-like behavior, and exposes the gaps and failures in current approaches. Building human aware environments (environments that perceive human activity and estimate human internal state) pushes the development of machine perception of humans. In addition to being socially useful, building human aware environments helps us develop humanoid robots that are capable of understanding and interacting with humans.
Machine learning underlies much of my work in both humanoid robotics and human aware environments. I am an experimentalist in the field of robot learning, specializing in the learning of challenging dynamic tasks such as juggling. I combine designing learning algorithms with exploring their behavior in implementations on actual robots and in intelligent environments. My research interests include nonparametric learning, memory-based learning, reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, and modeling human behavior.
Please also take a look at the home pages of my colleagues:
Humanoid Robotics, Stefan Schaal , and the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories at ATR.
Human Aware Environments:
NSF Engineering Research Center on
Quality of Life Technology.
I am a Professor in the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU. I received the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University and the Ph.D. degree in Brain and Cognitive Science from M.I.T. I joined the M.I.T. faculty in 1986, moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing in 1994, and moved to CMU in 2000. I have received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Teaching Award from the MIT Graduate Student Council.