Apr 20 2015
Dr. Robin Roberson Murphy, Raytheon Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, is the recipient of the prestigious Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics.
Murphy - CRASAR
Murphy was recognized for her "pioneering work in humanitarian disaster response through search and rescue robotics, to the benefit of both survivors and responders."
The Lawler Award is presented every two years by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Murphy will be honored at the ACM Awards Banquet this June in San Francisco.
Murphy directs the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, which is an arm of the Center for Emergency Informatics encompassing all information science research relevant to emergency management.
Her primary research focus is on artificial intelligence for mobile robots as applied to disaster robotics. Murphy had an early background in mechanical engineering and said she later fell in love with computer science/artificial intelligence, She said she found cognitive engineering and how you put that into a mechanical creature just fascinating.
Receiving her doctoral degree in the 1990's and her reaction to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing/Kobe earthquake disasters, led Murphy to rescue robotics research.
"People are trapped and you can't get to them, but if you have something small you could have crawled in there," said Murphy. "You could have helped find people or stayed with them, and that became a very compelling case study for me."
Named one of the Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers for 2015 for her use of innovative robotic technology to solve emergency challenges encompassing hurricanes, chemical and radiological events, earthquakes, and infectious diseases, Murphy has deployed to 18 incidents, including the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse, Hurricane Katrina, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Her recent book, Disaster Robotics, won an honorable mention for Engineering and Technology at the 2015 American Publishers PROSE Awards.
Among her numerous professional awards are the Motohiro Kisoi award and the AUVSI Foundation Al Aube award. Murphy was declared an "Innovator in AI" by TIME, an "Alpha Geek" by WIRED Magazine, and one of the "Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company. She is a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Administrative Committee and co-founded the Technical Committee on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics and its annual conference. She serves on several government and professional boards, most recently the Defense Science Board.