In mid-December, CSE alumnus Charles Bergan (right) delivered the opening keynote speech at RoboUniverse, a conference and expo in San Diego. The conference focused on robots, drones and the Internet of Everything, and Bergan's talk was titled "The Robotics Revolution." A VP of Engineering in Qualcomm's Research Software group, Bergan -- who earned his M.S. from CSE in 1989 -- shared insights about the innovative technologies under development at Qualcomm in order to take robotics to the next level via smarter and safer robots that can be better positioned to help society. Topics during the Dec. 15 keynote included autonomous cars, superintelligence threats, and drone safety.
Other speakers at the three-day conference included CSE graduate student Zachary Chase Lipton (left), who expects to finish his Ph.D. on machine learning in 2017 in CSE Prof. Charles Elkan's Artifiicial Intelligence Group. In a panel discussion, Chase -- who earned his M.S. from CSE in 2015 -- explored cognitive reasoning platforms, with particular emphasis on "spinning social media interactions into gold." In his research, Chase has focused on the application of recurrent neural networks to medical data, natural language datasets, computer vision and music information retrieval. For the past two summers, he did internships at both Microsoft Research (in Bangalore) and, in 2015, as a machine-learning scientist at Amazon.