Teresa M. Donnellan

New certificate program in responsible AI starting fall 2024

Martha Bushong — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:52:55 +0000

New certificate program in responsible AI starting fall 2024 Martha Bushong Fri, 03/01/2024 - 10:52

In This Story

Learn More About the Certificate

Under the guidance of Missy Cummings, a professor and the director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC) at George Mason University, the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program addresses the pressing need for thoughtful AI integration into various industries.

Missy Cummings

“With the rise of large language models like ChatGPT, there is a critical need for companies to develop strategies for effectively and safely integrating AI into their systems. The Mason approach to Responsible AI emphasizes both rigorous technical and sociotechnical approaches to identifying and mitigating AI risks while achieving value-added outcomes,” said Cummings.

Ideal candidates for this certificate program are “people responsible for ensuring the safe and efficacious adoption of AI into their companies or agencies who want to develop and update their skills to understand the design, testing, and implementation of cutting-edge technology,” she added.

Cummings especially looks forward to teaching the AI Design and Deployment Risks class, she said, “because we analyze current and pressing issues surrounding the risks of deploying AI. The combination of theory and practice is critical to understanding these issues, as well as developing the technology and policy mitigations needed to ensure safe and efficacious AI.”

Topics

Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

Artificial Intelligence

Aspiring to smoother traffic

Teresa Donnellan — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 19:19:23 +0000

Aspiring to smoother traffic Teresa Donnellan Fri, 06/02/2023 - 15:19

In This Story

Brian Mark

There are few better feelings than hitting all green lights on your drive home. Brian Mark’s research aims to bring you that feeling more often. Ideally, technology can help you hit a “green wave” by keeping your car within an optimal speed bracket, says professor of electrical and computer engineering Brian Mark. The increasing likelihood of autonomous vehicles on the road offers a prospect even more promising than the idea of creating an app for human drivers, originally proposed in joint work of Mark and Dr. Mel Friedman, a retired physicist from the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Through Mason's Office of Technology Transfer, Friedman and Mark recently submitted a U.S. patent application on a method for coordinating traffic lights and reducing traffic congestion.

“It probably will work even better with connected and automated vehicles,” explains Mark, “so you know the car itself is programmed to keep on the green wave. Like, if you have to turn right, you might not be on the green wave; so ... you might have to catch up to the green wave ahead of you or slow down to catch the green wave behind you.”

Mark supervised a senior design project to move toward his goal sponsored by the Army Strategic Program for Innovation, Research, and Employment (ASPIRE). Three George Mason Electrical and Computer Engineering department teams participated in ASPIRE, supervised by Qilian Li, Brian Mark, and Cameron Nowzari, respectively. As part of the program, in addition to several Zoom meetings, the seniors attended a spring meeting at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where they presented their project progress.

Mark’s ASPIRE team constructed a model of a connected and automated vehicle. Sara Sulaiman Alaraini, Colin Graves, Corey Jones, Nitin Mandadi, Andrew Mokhtare, and Adham Obeid modified a remote-control vehicle to operate autonomously on a tarp designed like a road system, complete with centralized traffic light–controlled intersections. The team outfitted the car with sensors, a camera, and arUco tags to help it stay oriented in its environment.

"The traffic lights are connected to a centralized server, and the car is able to automatically stop at a traffic light and then go when it turns green,” said Mark.

“Through the centralized server you can indicate the destination ... It will automatically calculate the path through the street grid, and the car will just go to that destination and obey all the traffic lights as it goes.”

Mark hopes a future senior design team can further extend the project by incorporating multiple cars to simulate traffic scenarios.

“The next project would be if you have a bunch of cars. And they're all following green waves, so that they're all obeying the traffic lights. But they never really have to stop unless they have to turn. That would be the ultimate demonstration of this concept.”

Topics

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty

Autonomous Cars

robotics and autonomous systems

Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

Mason engineers collaborate, compete in RobotX competition down under

Teresa Donnellan — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 18:50:18 +0000

Mason engineers collaborate, compete in RobotX competition down under Teresa Donnellan Wed, 01/18/2023 - 13:50

In This Story

Leigh McCue-Weil

Learn About Mechanical Engineering

A team of six from George Mason University competed in the 2022 Maritime RobotX competition in Penrith, Australia, in November 2022. The travel team comprised three undergraduate students, Emina Sinanovic, Damion Colgrove, and Orion Colgrove; graduate student Vanessa Barth; Mason alumnus Reginald Lockhart, and Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Leigh McCue.

McCue has been aware of the Maritime RobotX competition, run by RoboNation, for about a decade.

“Being here at Mason with the Potomac Science Center and this amazing waterfront and doing more and more work in maritime robotics, it seemed like the right time and place [to compete],” she says.

The project began with a group of electrical and computer engineering; computer science; systems engineering and operations research; and mechanical engineering faculty writing a proposal for the boat upon which much of the competition is based. In all, twenty-six students across those four departments engaged in this maritime robotics opportunity, with technical advising provided by multiple faculty from each of those departments.

When the opportunity to attend the fall 2022 competition in Australia arose, the group faced challenges: global shipping issues made shipping the boat to Australia risky and expensive, and most of the students originally working on the project had graduated. Fortunately, Lockhart, now working locally for Bechtel, was still able to participate. The rest of the team, including twin senior mechanical engineering students Damion and Orion Colgrove, joined the project this year.

“My team had been tasked with developing a digital twin unmanned surface vehicle,” says Damion. “Through our work on this project, we ended up overlapping [with] many of the core elements of the competition, primarily the autonomous capabilities of the wave-adaptive modular vehicle (WAM-V). Additionally, Orion’s capstone team has been working on an autonomous drone for search and rescue missions, and this overlapped with many of the aerial aspects of the competition. Due to this connection, we were fortunate enough to be invited to participate in this event, and the resulting learning experience has been beyond valuable.”

“We made a tactical decision a couple months out not to ship the boat and to participate technically as a ‘documentation only’ team,” McCue explains. Mason’s team could have competed in only the elements for which they could bring equipment, but they chose to collaborate, joining a merged, multidisciplinary team from two other universities. McCue says, “RoboNation generously provided us on-site workspace, and we traveled with our UAV and sensing packages, joining a team of teams with Lake Superior State University and Queensland University of Technology.” Lockhart remarked on the collaborative nature of the event: “Teams that we weren't even necessarily teaming up with were sharing knowledge [and] parts,” he recalls, noting that one team even lent the Mason students use of a 3D printer. Ultimately, the merged team comprising students from Lake Superior State, Queensland, and Mason won an award for partnership and collaboration at the competition.

The merged team with the boat from the Queensland University of Technology. Photo provided.

“Mason was able to tick off two competition tasks – the heartbeat message and UAV search and rescue,” McCue wrote in an email to colleagues after the event:

“It was exciting to see the onsite teamwork: as lead, Reggie [Lockhart] kept everyone on task, optimistic, and enthusiastic while rapidly tapping into resources from last year’s work; Emina [Sinanovic] and Vanessa [Barth] rallied to make the heartbeat happen; and, Orion and Damion [Colgrove] successfully executed UAV waypoint navigation and perception, all supported by the months of effort students and alums put into the project over the last year, plus wonderful camaraderie from all on-site teams, particularly our LSSU/QUT newfound friends.”

“We learned a lot over the course of this competition,” says Damion, adding, “Between events like this, as well as the senior capstone design program, … opportunities like this are some of the most valuable students can experience during their time in university.”

The team members expressed gratitude to all those who made this experience possible, and McCue looks forward to continuing Mason’s participation in RobotX at the next competition in 2024.