My Mentors

Dr. Ayanna Howard

Georgia Insitute of Technology
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Ayanna Howard received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, her M.S.E.E. from the University of Southern California, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1999. Her area of research is centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems. This work, which addresses issues of autonomous control as well as aspects of interaction with humans and the surrounding environment, has resulted in over 60 written works in a number of projects – from autonomous rover navigation for planetary surface exploration to intelligent terrain assessment algorithms for landing on Mars. To date, her unique accomplishments have been documented in over 12 featured articles - including being named as one of the world's top young innovators of 2003 by the prestigious MIT Technology Review journal and in TIME magazine’s "Rise of the Machines" article in 2004.

website: http://humanslab.ece.gatech.edu/

Photograph by Michael Grecco for TIME magazine
Biography from GA Tech faculty profile

Dr. Tiffany Barnes

University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Dept. of Computer Science

Dr. Tiffany Barnes received her BS(1995), MS(2000), and Ph. D.(2003) in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. She is currently an assistant professor at UNC-Charlotte. Her research interests include Advanced Learning Technologies and Artificial Intelligence, particularly used in Learning Environments, Clustering, and Data Mining. Her website also mentions research interests in Bioinformatics and Combinatorics but I have no idea what those terms mean so I'll just assume that she made them up. Dr. Barnes runs the Game2Learn project at UNC-Charlotte, an initiative to teach programming concepts to introductory students through video games. Through the Game2Learn project Dr. Barnes and I won the Essam El-Kwae Student-Faculty Research Award in 2007. She also is one of the founders of the STARS Alliance, an initiative to increase the participation of women, under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities in computing disciplines. I'll stop listing the diversity initiatives here because she pretty much participates/runs them all...

Her other interests (as far as I know) include, DDR(yay!), her cats, ballroom dancing, fluffy jackets, her husband, and Puzzle Pirates.

website: http://cs.uncc.edu/~tbarnes2

Photograph: I don't know who took this picture or where it came from...
Biography: Evie Powell