The executive committee
The YorRobots executive committee consists of colleagues from across the University.
Ana Cavalcanti is Professor of Software Verification at York and RAEng chair in Emerging Technologies working on 'Software Engineering for Robotics: modelling, validation, simulation, and testing'.
She held a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit award and a Royal Society Industry fellowship to work with QinetiQ in avionics. She has chaired the programme committee of several well-established international conferences, is on the editorial board of four international journals, and is chair of the Formal Methods Europe association.
She is, and has been, principal investigator on several large EPSRC grants. Her research is on theory and practice of verification and testing for robotics. She has published more than 150 papers.
Cade McCall, PhD, is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology at the University of York.
His research focuses on human affect and social interactions. McCall specialises in the use of virtual environments, motion capture, and psychophysiology for studying psychological processes as they unfold in naturalistic settings.
Cade's recent work investigates the role of social cognition in driving and in interactions with autonomous vehicles.
Michael Stuart is a philosopher working on the consequences of ML methods being used in science. He combines traditional philosophical approaches with qualitative and quantitative sociological methods. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2015, and has been a researcher or lecturer at the Universities of Bielefeld, Cambridge, Geneva, LSE, NYCU, Pittsburgh, Tubingen, and Zurich. Visit his website here: https://michaeltstuart.com/
Dr. Jihong Zhu is a lecturer in robotics at the School of Physics, Engineering, and Technology, and an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Safe Autonomy, University of York. He leads the Robot-Assisted Living Laboratory (RALLA) at York, where his research primarily focuses on deformable objects and assistive manipulation. Before joining York, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at both Cognitive Robotics, TU Delft, and Honda Research Institute, Europe. Jihong obtained his PhD at the University of Montpellier, where he conducted his research at LIRMM, supported by the H2020 VERSATILE project. He is presently an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), ICRA, and IROS. He is the founding co-chair of IEEE Working Group on Deformable Object Manipulation.