John A. Hancock

About this Page

About me: I recently defended my Ph.D. in Robotics at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm part of a large group working on the Automated Highway System, the highway system of the future where the cars will drive themselves. My advisors are Chuck Thorpe and Martial Hebert. (There's more information on my research page).

I am currently finishing up some work at CMU and looking for a job. If you're looking for a new employee with artificial intelligence or computer vision skills, take a look at my resume or more academically-oriented CV (PDF format).

Table of Contents (for this page and additional pages)

About Me

Although I do enjoy my research, it certainly doesn't leave much time for other hobbies, many of which I've had to put on hold. When I do find the time, however, I enjoy playing soccer, reading sci-fi and horror novels, cooking, playing computer games, photography, and of course, the things that just about every American male likes -- watching football, seeing violent movies, etc.

I play soccer with the Viking Death Rats, an intramural team made up mostly of robotics and computer science graduate students. On Sundays during football season, you'll find me watching the Steelers game (on TV --grad students can't spend the money for season tickets).

I like just about any kind of movie, though my favorites are action films (Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, any Schwarzenegger film -- you get the idea) and animated films. I like horror flicks too (or just about anything that has a dark side), but unfortunately there's a lot of BAD horror films out there. My personal horror favorite, however, is "The Hitcher" with Rutger Hauer.

I'm a big fan of horror novels, especially vampire novels. Dan Simmons, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice are all great. Some of my favorite horror novels are:

If you like sci-fi novels (and even if you don't), The Postman by David Brin is a great read (although the movie stank). Startide Rising and The Uplift War, also by David Brin, and Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle are probably my favorite sci-fi novels. All three are not only good fiction, but plausible science as well.

I'm sure I play too many computer games for my own good -- I like action, adventure, or strategy games. Although it's a little old at this point, I'm still a big fan of Marathon Infinity, a 3D action first-person perspective game for the Macintosh. In fact, I've developed some projects for the engine.

Finger Information.

Fun Stuff

So what do I do for fun when I can find the time?

Useful Sites on the Web

On Campus


John Hancock, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
jhancock@ri.cmu.edu
Last modified: Tue Apr 27 13:49:42 EDT 1999
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