2019 Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium

by Michelle Saport  |   

Nick Armstrong-Crews

UAA alumnus Nick Armstrong-Crews will keynote the 2019 Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium.

UAA alumnus Nick Armstrong-Crews will deliver the keynote address for the 2019 Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium on Thursday, April 18, at 7 p.m. in the Wendy Williamson Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.

Armstrong-Crews, senior software engineer at Google, will present: "Self-driving cars are here... and they're awesome!"

In the last 30 years, advances in technology have transformed our modern world, from our mobile devices' computing abilities to our laptops' superhuman powers. The next exciting chapter is applying the same innovative technology to self-driving cars. Career roboticist Nick Armstrong-Crews is helping lead the way in this technological frontier as a Waymo team member (previously known as Google's self-driving car project). Last year, he helped launch the world's first commercial self-driving car service. In this fascinating talk, Armstrong-Crews will detail the cutting-edge technology used to build these complex artificial intelligent minds, and will reveal why he believes these tenacious robots have the ability to revolutionize safety in America's auto industry and alter transportation as we know it in our country's cities.

About the speaker, Nick Armstrong-Crews UAA alumnus Nick Armstrong-Crews has dedicated his career to developing technology in self-driving cars to eradicate death caused by auto accidents. Born in Nome and raised in Fairbanks, he earned three Bachelor of Science degrees from UAA in computer science, math and natural sciences, and went on to pursue doctoral studies in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He has worked in artificial intelligence for the past 10 years, working on AI projects at NASA Ames, drone vision at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, hand-held 3D cameras at his start-up Heuristic Labs, and mobile machine learning at Google. Currently, he is working on multi-sensor fusion and perception for self-driving cars at Waymo.

(Read our recent interview with Armstrong-Crews to learn more about his undergraduate experience at UAA.)

The Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium is proudly presented by the University Honors College. Other events happening as part of the symposium include:

  • Poster fair: April 15-19 at UAA/APU Consortium Library
  • Research presentations: Friday, April 19, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Rasmuson Hall
  • Poster presentation session and reception: Friday, April 19, 3-4 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Lobby
  • Awards ceremony: Friday, April 19, 4-5 p.m. Central Parking Garage, Third Floor Lobby*

*Central Parking Garage, Third Floor Lobby is the large space in the Spine, between SSB and NSB, overlooking the East Campus Central Lot.

Learn more at uaa.alaska.edu/researchsymposium. For questions, call (907) 786-1086 or email uaa_honors@uaa.alaska.edu.

Creative Commons License "2019 Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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