Ayanna Howard
| Ayanna M. Howard | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | January 24, 1972 |
| Residence | Atlanta, Georgia |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Robotics |
| Institutions |
Georgia Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
| Alma mater |
University of Southern California Brown University Claremont Graduate University |
| Doctoral advisor | George A. Bekey |
Ayanna MacCalla Howard (born January 24, 1972) is an American roboticist and the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. To date, her unique accomplishments have been documented in more than a dozen featured articles. In 2003, she was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. She was featured in TIME magazine’s "Rise of the Machines" article in 2004. In 2008, Howard received worldwide attention for her SnoMote robots, designed to study the impact of global warming on the Antarctic ice shelves.
Howard received her B.S. in Engineering from Brown University in 1993 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Her thesis Recursive Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation was advised by George A. Bekey.
Howard also holds a M.B.A with a concentration in Strategy from Claremont Graduate University in 2005.
Shortly after finishing her undergraduate studies at Brown, Howard headed up the software team at Axcelis, Inc., coding the first commercial genetic algorithm package Evolver. Later she joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she led research efforts on various robotic projects utilizing soft computing methodologies such as computer vision, fuzzy logic, and neural networks. She primarily worked on the Mobility Systems Concept Development as a Senior Robotics Researcher, and the Technology Review journal named her as one of the world's top young innovators of 2003 for her work in this area. In 2005, Howard left JPL to join the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor and founded the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory.
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