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Dr. Dennis Hong is an Assistant Professor and the Director of RoMeLa(Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech. His research expertise lies in the areas of

• Novel robot locomotion mechanisms
• Design and analysis of mechanical systems
• Kinematics and robot mechanism design
• Humanoid robots
• Autonomous systems

He was the inventor of the three-legged walking robot ‘STriDER’ and the ‘whole skin locomotion’ inspired by amoeboid motility mechanisms.

Dr. Hong is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award. The five-year CAREER grant, worth more than $400,000, is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for creative junior faculty who are considered likely to become academic leaders of the future.

Dr. Hong is also very passionate about advising student design competition and robot competition teams. TEAM DARwIn for RoboCup 2007 (an international autonomous robot soccer competition) where he served as the advisor, was the first and only team from the United States ever to qualify for the RoboCup humanoid division. TEAM Victor Tango for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge (an autonomous vehicle race in the urban environment) where he served as the co-team leader, won third place with a cash award of $500,000.

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Dr. Elaine Chew is an Assistant Professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, where she is also a key investigator at the Integrated Media Systems Center. She received a B.A.S. in mathematical and computational sciences, and music at Stanford University, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between Cambridge and Los Angeles, she spent a year at Lehigh University as a Visiting Assistant Professor.

Dr. Chew’s thesis, completed under the supervision of Jeanne Bamberger, with OR co-advisor Georgia Perakis, proposed a mathematical model for tonality, the system of relations that serves as a framework for our hearing of tonal music, and computational methods for abstracting tonal structures. Her Spiral Array model and associated algorithms introduced an “interior point” approach to the problem of key finding in computational music cognition. A year after graduation, she was recruited by the University of Southern California’s Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering to forge a link between the department and the Integrated Media Systems Center.

At USC, Dr. Chew’s foray into mathematical modeling of music flourished and expanded to include collaborative projects in music information retrieval, distributed immersive performance, and musical expression synthesis. She also developed a course on computational methods for music perception and cognition.

Apart from creating computer models to analyze and manipulate music, Dr. Chew also performs frequently as an articulate proponent of post-tonal music. Her performances can be heard on NPR and WGBH’s Art of the States program.

In 2004, Dr. Chew was honored with an NSF Career award for her proposal on performer-centered approaches to computer-assisted music making, in which she stated that her purpose was “to establish engineering music research as a core academic discipline” and to “promote the use of computational research in music processing by humans as a basis for creating and improving human-computer interaction in computer music systems”.

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Dr. William Halal

Dr. Halal is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and Innovation at George Washington University. An authority on emerging technology, strategic planning, and institutional change, Dr. Halal has worked with AT&T, the Department of Defense, the Asian Development Bank, and various government agencies. His work has appeared in journals such as Nature BioTechnology and Strategy & Business, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Executive Excellence, and The Futurist.

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