DARPA Urban Challenge Site Visit

Officials from the DARPA Urban Challenge (DUC) conducted a site visit at Lehigh’s Goodman Campus on Sunday, July 8, 2007. The purpose of the visit was to evaluate the vehicle capability of the Ben Franklin Racing Team’s autonomous vehicle, “Little Ben” which is entered in the competition. The Ben Franklin Racing team is led by the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Lehigh University. The team consists of students and faculty at both Penn and Lehigh all of who have demonstrated a wide range of expertise in developing and deploying unmanned systems and conducting field demonstrations of autonomous vehicles. The Lehigh team is led by John Spletzer.

We are very happy to report that Little Ben performed exceptionally well during the evaluation, successfully completing all 4 missions in approximately two hours.

For more information on the DUC see www.darpa.mil/GrandChallenge/index.asp

Information on the Ben Franklin Racing Team can be found at www.benfranklinracingteam.org/

                               Little Ben performing at DUC site visit

Keynote Address

Henry Baird delivered the keynote address, "Towards Highly Versatile Document Image Analysis, " at the 2nd Korea-Japan Joint Workshop on Pattern Recognition, held in Matsushima, Japan, October 25-26, 2007. 

Promotions

Congratulations to Professors Jeff Heflin and Hector Munoz-Avila. Both have been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure. Jeff’s research interests include establishing semantic interoperability between heterogeneous information systems, scalable ontology reasoning, and developing formal theories of distributed ontology systems. He is one of the pioneers of Semantic Web research and wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation on the subject. He has been involved in the design of many important Semantic Web languages, including the international standard OWL. He is an NSF CAREER award recipient and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics.

Hector has done extensive research on case-based reasoning, planning, and machine learning having written over 10 journal papers and over 40 refereed conference/workshop papers on the subject. Two of these papers received awards. His research interests also include advancing game AI with AI techniques. He is also a recipient of an NSF CAREER award.