Alright, welcome to our kickoff symposium. We do this. I'm going to say that we do this every year. Even though this is the second consecutive year that we've done it, we, we started this just before the pandemic came and it was a blast. And then the pandemic came in and everything just fell apart for two years. So we're going to try and really make this year a normal and fun and exciting year for robotics at Georgia Tech last year was all right, but we were still reeling and making transitions and things. And so I'm gonna give you just sort of a brief overview. Some of you, if you were here for the the PhD masters orientation on Friday, you've seen some of this. But probably at the end of that you were thinking that was really good. I would like to see it again. So you're in luck. I'm going to show you some of those things again today. This is the overview for the day. There are coffee breaks from time-to-time, take advantage of them to meet the people that are around you. So a lot of you are new. So if you're new, if this is your first week or second week on Georgia Tech's campus, raise your hand. Alright, so you should all sort, especially the new people. Notice who the other new people are because you're the cohort, right? You guys should be bonding together to fight the man. I mean, that's me basically make friends, allies, and really make teams that can go together for if you're here for a couple of years for a master's or for ten years for a PhD. Find, find your cohort, find your colleagues. This is the list of topics that we're going to have today. It's not comprehensive in any way of the research that happens at iron. Alright, so this is, there are two things that happen when this scheduled goes together. First, I thought if we gave you money for a seed grant, we should make you give a talk. So first it's people who got seed grants from Iran and talking about what they did with that money. And I think it's actually I know what they did, so I think it's cool and I'm delighted that they're going to talk about it. Then in the afternoon, we have quite a few of our robotics faculty that are winning NSF Career awards these days. And so I picked four of them to come and talk about their research as well. Because these are, if you win the NSF Career Award, if you don't know about this, it's I think probably one of the most, if not the most prestigious funding award that you can win as a young person, right? So it's a five-year pile of money. You can just relax and do the research that you want to do without scrambling all the time. And it really, it leads to very high-quality output quite often. And I'm sure with these four, it has been Sam, I think is on the on the backend of his and I know it's been really good for Sam. That's half the speakers. The other half. It's people that I wanted to hear what they had to say. It's remarkably self-indulgent on my part. But luckily for you, my interests are everybody's interests. And so you're going to hear a bunch of good talks that will be interesting if you're new here and you're looking for people to talk to and work with. Go also to our website, pop open the list of faculty. Look at their research areas and familiarize yourself with what's going on. If you're choosing classes that you should be taking, don't look only at your own school. If you're a mechanical engineer. Look also at the course is coming from the computer science, from electrical engineering and so forth. Because in the robotics world, It's not a siloed, discipline-specific world. And if you're only talking to people from your own little discipline, I don't want to say a little from your own discipline that you were in when you were in an undergrad world, you're going to miss it. There's no reason to be at Georgia Tech. If you're only going to talk to the people that you would have gone to school with as an undergrad anyway. So it makes sure that you meet people, mingle with people. In addition, there are a bunch of people from industry here today, people from symbolic, people from Amazon and maybe from other places as well. So you could actually start today trying to get your full-time job when you're done. I'm not going to tell you who those people are because if you can't find them, you don't deserve to be working for them. Alright, so that's like a test. That's the first bar you have to clear as to identify the people that might be hiring at some future point. So that's the way the seminar is. It's on the web, you can read about it. Many of you don't know what Iran is. The institutes robotics and intelligent machines. Nobody knows why it's called robotics and intelligent machines. It's a historical artifacts, so I'm probably going to mainly call it the Robotics Institute. This is how it is. Every university has a bunch of academic departments. Georgia Tech has a bunch of academic departments. Iran is not an academic department. We don't have a diene as the director of this institute. I do not report to a dean. Deans look jealously at what we have, right? So deans oversee academic departments and colleges. Our Gang crosses many different schools and there's a list on the, on the, on your right eye of some of the schools that are represented here. And you see the obvious ones, right? If you're an engineer, there's a chance that you do robotics. But if you scroll down that list, you see physicist, you see people from the School of Music. I really hope this year to invite some people from the public policy world to start hanging with us and talking about concerns that are bigger than just the technological concerns. So that's on the horizon. But it's really a broadly interdisciplinary gang. And it's not just interdisciplinary within a college. It's much broader, right? So it's the College of Engineering, the College of Computing, and the College of Sciences, Right? So it's a bunch of different deans that have faculty that are hanging out with us and doing things. So it really is a good bunch. We've got a PhD program, we've got a master's program. We have a lot of students now. My understanding is about 70 new masters students arrived in about 30 new PhD students arrived. That's in addition to numbers that you see here. That means there are, I can now say we have hundreds of students in graduate programs with the name robotics associated to it. In addition to those, there are plenty of students who think my life will be better if my diploma says computer science than if it says robotics. There are a bunch of computer science students doing research in robotics and likewise for the other disciplines, right? So the choice of what word goes on your diploma is driven by what you think is going to be best for you down the road regardless of the research that you're doing. So it's really not an exaggeration to say there are hundreds of students down doing robotics research at Georgia Tech. That's where we are on campus, labs all over the place. And I showed this just in case anybody has $20 billion for a robotics building so that we can centralize. All right, Not today either. What do we do? I'm going to not give the whole presentation here. I'll save some of her after lunch. But this is basically what we do. A lot of different application kinds of areas. There are very few application areas that somebody's that are absent robotics researchers at Georgia Tech, right? So we really aren't doing a bunch of stuff. This, if you think about the kind of technological spectrum, what are the areas of science or engineering that are of interest? It's basically actuators to intelligence. And I think there are almost no gaps between the top and the bottom of this charged right now in terms of the research being done here. So if there's something that you're interested in, in robotics, there's probably somebody here interested in that as well. I exaggerate a little bit. We don't really do learning of every kind because I think by now there are 873 million kinds of machine learning. And we're not doing 873 million kinds of machine learning, but we're doing a bunch specifically in robotics and at Georgia Tech, more broadly across the spectrum of sciences and even brought it in science. There are plenty of machine learning folks on campus as well. We have facilities that I'll just tell you briefly, because they may be of interest to you in terms of shaping how you think about the experiments that you can do. Like what's the kind of empirical investigation that you can do here? These are basically things that anybody can access. Some of them you have to find a way to pay for and some of them are just free. Here's the human augmentation core facility, at least one speaker today we'll talk about stuff that happens in this facility. It's spectacular. It's got actuation capabilities that are able to take a human being and basically tossed the human around as the human tries to walk while wearing an exoskeleton or any kind of augmentation device and it's completely instrumented so you can measure everything interesting about that interaction between the human and the world as the humans trying to do things. There's a gate lab where you can continue these kinds of studies. Amazing facility. The robo Tara M is here. It's a platform that you can access from anywhere in the world if there's an Internet connection. So you can really download your experimental code to the libertarian from a small village in a forest somewhere. If there's an Internet connection to that small village. And people really do use this from all over the world. And then there's the aware home, which we're still in the process of building stronger connections with those. Iran does not own the aware home that's owned by the Institute for people in intelligent or people in technology. But we're going to try and put this robot in that home. Right now this robot is over in class learning how to do tricks. But once it gets a little more intelligence, a little more capability, what I hope to put it over there, where home is a real house, furniture, bathroom, kitchen. The whole deal meant to be studying how to help the aging population as, as, as people age in their own homes, rather than packing them off and picking them up and sending them off to some sort of special care facility or hospitalized or whatever. I think I'll stop right there now because it's time to start talking about technical stuff.