Tom Williams

/in /by

Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017. Tom’s research focuses on enabling and understanding natural language based human-robot interaction that is sensitive to environmental, cognitive, social, and moral context. His work is funded by grants from NSF, ONR, and ARL, as well as by Early Career awards from NSF, NASA, and AFOSR.

Neil Dantam

/in /by

Neil Dantam is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines. His research focuses on robot planning and control. He has developed methods to combine discrete and geometric planning, improve Cartesian control, and analyze discrete robot policies. In addition, he has worked on practical aspects of robot manipulation and software design to ensure that new theoretical techniques can be validated in the physical world.

Previously, Neil was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computer Science at Rice University working with Prof. Lydia Kavraki and Prof. Swarat Chaudhuri. Neil received a Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Tech, advised by Prof. Mike Stilman, and B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. He has worked at iRobot Research, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Raytheon. Neil received the Georgia Tech President’s Fellowship, the Georgia Tech/SAIC paper award, an American Control Conference ’12 presentation award, and was a Best Paper and Mike Stilman Award finalist at HUMANOIDS ’14.