This talk will discuss the current state of the art in robotics and particularly focus on the directions that robotics is taking and the impact it will have on our society in the near future. Exciting robotics research will be briefly surveyed. The talk will additionally discuss the National Robotics Initiative whose goal is to accelerate the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside, or cooperatively with, people. This initiative was recently launched by President Obama and has significant participation from all major funding agencies.

Congratulations to Prof. Ramaswamy for receiving a grant from NSF for his project on building Cloud-based Big-Data techniques for federated Internet of Things.

Congratulations to Prof. Tianming Liu for receiving a 5-year NIH R01 grant to develop and validate neuroimaging biomarkers for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. This is a collaborative grant with researchers in UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University.

Congratulations to Prof. Kang Li, Roberto Perdisci have received a two-year NSF award for their project entitled DUE-SATC: Stepwise and Reusable Problem-solving Challenges.