Video: Jacobs School computer scientist talks about the future of health care robotics

 UC San Diego computer scientist Laurel Riek wants to put a robot in someone's home for six months.
"We want to build robots that can adapt to learn from and change with a person, not only throughout the week, but throughout the day," she says in this video for the journal Communications of the ACM.
Riek is the author of a review article titled Healthcare Robotics in the journal's November 2017 issue.
The full text of the article is available here: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/11/222171-healthcare-robotics/fulltext
She is a professor of computer science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and a faculty member of the campus' Contextual Robotics Institute.
Her research goal is to enable robots to robustly solve problems in dynamically- changing human environments. Riek is particularly focused on problems in real-world, safety-critical healthcare environments, such as hospitals, homes and clinics. Her work tackles the fundamental and applied problems that make complex, real-world perception and interaction in these spaces so challenging for robots. Riek’s work draws on techniques from the fields of computer vision, machine learning, non-linear dynamics, and human factors to enable robots to autonomously perceive, respond, and adapt to people in the real world.  

UC San Diego team takes 4th place in regional programming competition

A team of UC San Diego computer science students tied with seven other campuses for first place in the 2015 ACM Southern California Regional Programming Contest on Nov. 14.

The tie was finally resolved based on the time it took to solve problems, with the UC San Diego team landing in fourth place, after Caltech, USC and UCLA. Fourth-ranked UC San Diego Team "Phuket" comprised of Juliati Alafate, Chicheng  Zhang and Lifan Wu.

Hat tip to graduate student coaches Igors Stepanovs and Yuliang Li, as well as faculty coach Michael Taylor.

In all, UC San Diego fielded four teams during the competition. The other three teams placed 14th, 15th and 19th out of 89 teams that took place in the competition. Members of the other three teams were:

Karan Wadhera
Jason Wu
Timothy Wang

Archana Radhakrishna
Darshan Patil
Ujjwal Gulecha

Huayin Zhou
Galen Krulce
Huajie Wu

Yeyao Tao
Junxi Li
Zhiwei Jia
Sung Rim Huh

More info:
Team website:  http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/UCSDProgramContest/
For final standings, go to:  http://socalcontest.org/history/2015/details-2015.shtml