Dr. Ayanna Howard received her B.S. in 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 70 written publications focused on 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. From 1993-2005, Dr. Howard was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where she led research efforts on various robotic projects utilizing vision, fuzzy logic, and neural network methodologies. Following this, she joined Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an Associate Professor and founded the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Laboratory.
