|  ATLANTA, Ga., July 28, 2005 - They are cute and cuddly, and they play a mean game of soccer. They are four robotic pups that have been masterfully programmed by six Spelman College students to independently play soccer.
The six young women and their band of four Sony AIBO entertainment robots, known as SpelBots, are the only robotics team that is all-female, all Black, and all undergraduate who competed in the third annual RoboCup U.S. Open at Georgia Tech in May; and who also competed July 13-19 in Osaka, Japan, at the International RoboCup 2005 Four-Legged Robot soccer competition.
Thirty years from now, when historians look back to see how HBCUs were involved in robotics research, Spelman College will dominate their findings. Students Aryen Moore-Alston (team leader), Brandy Kinlaw (lead software integrator), Ebony Smith, Karina Liles, Ebony O'Neal and Shinese Noble make up the SpelBots Soccer Team .
The SpelBots' (short for Spelman roBotics) participation in the competition was no small feat. Out of the 24 teams from around the world that qualified, Spelman is the first and only HBCU, the only all women institution, and the only U.S. undergraduate institution to qualify.
The other U.S. teams are Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin. The remaining teams are from Europe, South America, Asia and Australia.
RoboCup soccer matches teams of four Sony AIBO four-legged robots in a soccer competition. The robots must autonomously ( without human intervention) find the soccer ball, the goal and their competition. Then they must try to score goal shots while defending their own goal.
The research topics and technology involved include computer vision, localization, motion and locomotion, robot path planning, multi-robot coordination and robot communication. Spelman's team is also researching the ability of robots to learn optimal behaviors such as kicking using a machine learning algorithm. Under the direction of Dr. Andrew Williams, the students are using and adapting a software framework called Tekkotsu that originated from Carnegie Mellon University.
The SpelBots team also competed in the RoboCup U.S. Open in May this year at Georgia Tech, and hopes to inspire other young women to pursue education and research at Spelman and explore careers in computer science and robotics.
The team acknowledges the generous support of President Beverly Daniel Tatum; Dr. Andrea Lawrence, chair of the computer science department at Spelman; Dr. Ayanna Howard, Eddie Tunstel and Eva Graham from NASA JPL; Charles Bartel, University of Iowa; Dayo Ajayi, Spelman College, and Dr. Dave Touretzky and Ethan Tira-Thompson from Carnegie Mellon University.
This summer, Dr. Andrew Williams, travelled with his RoboCup robot soccer team, the SpelBots, to Osaka, Japan to compete in the International RoboCup 2005. Dr. Williams recently joined the faculty at Spelman College in August 2004 after five years as an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Iowa.
"Many people wonder why I would come to Spelman from a Big 10 major research institution. When it comes down to it, it was due to spiritual reasons. I decided that one reason God made me was to uplift and enable African American young people academically, vocationally, spiritually and economically."
"I want the world to know what is possible when we inspire our young women and men of African descent to dream beyond themselves…dream seemingly impossible dreams that become possible when you believe in a Creator much bigger than yourself."
Prior to coming to Spelman, Dr. Williams acquired in excess of $1 million dollars in research funding from the National Institutes of Health, Microsoft, and the National Science Foundation while at the University of Iowa. Since joining Spelman, Dr. Williams has brought with him to the College over $400,000 of his NIH research funding, helped secure over $30,000 of NASA funding. His SpelBots research, teaching, and service efforts also had a hand in the $50,000 gift given to Spelman from the Coca-Cola Foundation.
He has published in research journals in the area of artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, robotics, multi-agent systems, and ontologies. During his first year at Spelman, he published his work in the IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, and has had four other papers accepted for publication, two of which of have Spelman student co-authors. This past fall, he was selected as one of thirty U.S. engineers to participate in a research conference sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering and the Engineering Academy of Japan in Kyoto, Japan.
His bioinformatics research at Spelman focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to help clinicians and geneticists define new phenotypes to reach consensus on phenotype nomenclature and classification, necessary for discovery the location of disease genes.
"Some of my collaborators recently published a new disease gene finding for Age-related Macular Degeneration; and the research I’ve done since being at Spelman has positioned us to test out new hypotheses related to our AI techniques and this disease."
The research that has been getting the most attention recently is his research related to robotics and the international RoboCup project.
RoboCup is an international joint research project to advance artificial intelligence by using competitions, such as soccer, to demonstrate new computer algorithms.
"Robots, in the future, will be able to assist humans in tasks such as building lunar habitats or search and rescue people trapped in a burning building or even to help operate on people. At Spelman College, we are seeking to advance this research through our participation in RoboCup."
Spelman provided Dr. Williams with a robotics lab in the science center complete with four Sony AIBO four-legged robots to help fulfill his vision to form a Spelman team to compete in the international robot competition.
"I want the world to know what is possible when we inspire our young women and men of African descent to dream beyond themselves…dream seemingly impossible dreams that become possible when you believe in a Creator much bigger than yourself."
Dr. Williams received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas, his Master of Science degree in electrical and computer engineering from Marquette University, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas. He was previously employed at Allied Signal Aerospace Company (now Honeywell), and GE Medical Systems, where he graduated from their Edison Engineering Technical Leadership Development program. He is happily married to his wife of thirteen years and has three beautiful children
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Founded in 1881, Spelman College is the only historically Black college in the nation to be included among U.S. News and World Report's Top 75 "Best Liberal Arts Colleges - Bachelor's," 2005. This private, historically Black college for women boasts outstanding alumnae such as Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman; former Foreign Service Director General, Ruth Davis; authors Tina McElroy Ansa and Pearl Cleage; and actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson. More than 81 percent of the full-time faculty holds Ph.D.s or other terminal degrees and the student-faculty ratio is 12:1. The students number 2,121 and represent 41 states and 15 foreign countries. |
