Tag Archives: Elizabeth Croft

Café Scientifique (Vancouver, Canada) and human-robot collaboration on Feb. 23, 2016

On Tuesday, February 23, 2016 at 7:30 pm,  Café Scientifique, in the back room of The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.]), will be hosting a talk on human-robot collaboration (from the Feb. 3, 2016 announcement),

Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Elizabeth A. Croft.  The title of her talk is:

Up Close and Personal with Human-Robot Collaboration

Advances in robot control, sensing and intelligence are rapidly expanding the potential for close-proximity human-robot collaborative work. In many different contexts, from manufacturing assembly to home care settings, a robot’s potential strength, precision and process knowledge can productively complement human perception, dexterity and intelligence to produce a highly coupled, coactive, human-robot team. Such interactions, however, require task-appropriate communication cues that allow each party to quickly share intentions and expectations around the task. These basic communication cues allow dyads, human-human or human-robot, to successfully and robustly pass objects, share spaces, avoid collisions and take turns – some of the basic building blocks of good, safe, and friendly collaboration regardless of one’s humanity. In this talk we will discuss approaches to identifying, characterizing, and implementing communicative cues and validating their impact in human-robot interaction scenarios.

Dr. Croft was featured here previously in a June 7, 2013 posting when she gave a talk titled, Transforming Human-Robot Interaction and again in a July 23, 2013 post about a gender workshop in engineering. Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Croft’s webpage on the University of British Columbia Faculty of Applied Science Engineering Dept. webspace,

Elizabeth Croft is Associate Dean, Education and Professional Development for the Faculty of Applied Science, director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab, and a registered Professional Engineer in the Province of British Columbia. Her research investigates how robotic systems can operate efficiently and effectively in partnership with people, in a safe, predictable, and helpful manner. She is author of over 120 refereed publications in robotics, controls, visual servoing and human robot interaction. Applications of this work range from manufacturing assembly to healthcare and assistive technology and her work has been funded by industry partners including Thermo-CRS, General Motors and Hyundai Heavy Industries. She received a Peter Wall Early Career Scholar Award in 2001, and an NSERC Accelerator Award in 2007, and a YWCA Women of Distinction Award in 2013. She was named Fellow of Engineers Canada (2008) and of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2009), and one of WXN’s top 100 most powerful women in Canada (2014).

Enjoy!

Science events in Vancouver (Canada) for June 7 and June 13, 2013

There’s a University of British Columbia CIHR (Canadian Institutes for Health Research) Café Scientifique event taking place tonight, June 7, 2013, from the event webpage,

June 7, 2013

Blusson Spinal Cord Centre [this is one of the buildings that form the Vancouver General Hospital complex]
7:00 pm

Map & Directions

Join ICORD engineer Dr. Peter Cripton and physician Dr. Peter Wing for refreshments and informal discussion about strategies and devices to prevent spinal cord injuries.
Moderated by Dr. Chris McBride, Executive Director, SCI-BC

No charge • Everyone welcome • Registration required.

You can register here but there is currently a waitlist. I think the reason for event’s popularity can be intuited by reading this event description,

Join ICORD engineer and UBC mechanical engineering prof. Peter Cripton and spine surgeon Dr. Peter Wing at the next Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Café Scientifique for an informal discussion about strategies and devices to prevent spinal cord injuries.

The Café provides a forum for health researches to connect directly with the public and broad local research communities in an informal setting. Cripton and Wing will be joined by film and animation producer and injury prevention speaker Kirsten Sharp. [emphasis mine]

The words film and animation attracted my attention and I’m assuming the same would be true of others who might not usually attend a talk about spinal cord injuries.

For those who require a little more notice, there’s a Thursday, June 13, 2013 Women in Science event at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, from the event page,

Thursday, June 13, 7:00 pm
Transforming Human-Robot Interaction – Dr. Elizabeth Croft
Depictions of robots vary from the helpful humanoid to destructive, evil entities. In reality, most robots are used in lab or industrial settings.  These robots are fast, strong and accurate, but not ideal co-workers. They don’t communicate well with humans, and are not always designed for safety when in close proximity to people.  Dr. Croft is finding ways to help humans and robots to work together.
Dr. Elizabeth Croft, B.A.Sc. (88, Mech, UBC), M.A.Sc (92, Mech, Waterloo), Ph.D. (95, Mech, Toronto), PEng, FEC, FASME
Dr. Croft is a professor at UBC; NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering, BC-Yukon at UBC; and leader of the WWEST program for women in engineering, science and technology.  The focus of this initiative is to promote science and engineering as a career choice for women and other under-represented groups, and to identify and eliminate barriers that result in attrition from these career paths. She is the founding faculty advisor for the UBC Engineering Tri-Mentoring Program, and is director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at UBC.

I found some additional information on the event page (at the bottom),

7:00 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm)
Admission by donation

As for the location, you really need to check out the map and the directions. The HR MacMillan Space Centre is one of two tenants (the other is the Museum of Vancouver) in a facility located in a park near Kitsilano beach. The Bard on the Beach Shakespeare festival which takes place beside the facility starts June 12, 2013. This is a very popular festival and June 13, 2013 is the festival’s opening night for its production of Hamlet. Taking the bus means a 10 -15 minute hike, as well as, the festival hubbub and parking in that area is likely to be at a premium.