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Willow Garage Leadership Team
SCOTT HASSAN: Founder
Scott
Hassan is best known as the founder of eGroups (a group email messaging
company now known as Yahoo Groups), and was the key software
architect/developer of Google, Alexa Internet and the Stanford Digital
Library. Throughout his life, Scott has had a deep interest in Open
Source software, computers and autonomy. These interests led him to
start Willow Garage, a privately-funded research company aiming
to advance the state of robotic technology in autonomous devices. Scott
brings to his role at Willow Garage a combination of startup experience
and expertise building large software systems using Open Source tools.
STEVE COUSINS: President and CEO
Steve Cousins is a
seasoned executive, entrepreneur and innovator with a strong track
record for managing research and development organizations and
realizing a significant return on investment. Prior to joining Willow
Garage, Steve was the senior manager of the User-Focused Systems
Research Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center, one of the top
human-computer interaction research groups in the world. Earlier, Steve
managed the Advanced Systems Development Laboratory at the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC).
BRIAN GERKEY: Director, Open Source Development
Dr. Brian
Gerkey is an experienced researcher and developer, with a track record
of building open source communities around robotics software. Brian is
leading the software development for the PR2 robot and is contributing
to the design of the Robot Operating System (ROS), a community project
initiated by Willow Garage and Stanford University. Before joining
Willow Garage, Brian was a Computer Scientist in the SRI Artificial
Intelligence Center, and a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research has covered a variety of
areas, including mobile manipulation, multi-robot coordination, outdoor
robot navigation, and computational geometry. Brian is also founding
and co-lead developer on the open source Player Project, which produces
one of the most widely used software platforms for robotics research
and education.
GARY BRADSKI: Senior Scientist
Dr. Gary Rost Bradski is a
Senior Scientist at Willow Garage and is leading an effort to develop
reliable object and pose recognition to enable robotic grasping and
manipulation. Gary is leveraging his experience in robotics, machine
learning and computer vision research acquired while working in
Stanford University's AI Lab. Prior to joining Willow Garage, Gary
organized the vision team for Stanley, the Stanford autonomous car that
won the DARPA Grand Challenge race in 2005, and helped found the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project under the
leadership of Professor Andrew Ng. In 1999, while at Intel, Gary
started the Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV).
KURT KONOLIGE: Senior Scientist
Dr. Kurt Konolige is a
Senior Scientist at Willow Garage, and Consulting Professor of Computer
Science at Stanford University. Kurt’s chief interest is
real-time algorithms for robot perception. At Willow Garage, he is
leading the development of visual navigation, stereo vision and 3D
reconstruction from range data. Before joining Willow Garage, Kurt was
a Senior Computer Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of
SRI International. While at SRI, Kurt conducted research in fuzzy
control for reactive systems; in constraint-based planning and
inference systems; in reasoning about perceptual information; and in
real-time robotics and vision systems.