Lynne Parker

LYNNE E. PARKER is an Associate Dean in the Tickle College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK), and a Professor in UTK’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Prior to becoming Associate Dean, she served for two years as the Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF). During her service at NSF, she co-led a White House-commissioned task force that created the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan. She also served previously as a Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dr. Parker received her Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a leading international researcher in the field of cooperative multi-robot systems, and has performed research in the areas of mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation. Her dissertation research (1994) on ALLIANCE, a distributed architecture for multi-robot cooperation, was the first PhD dissertation worldwide on the topic of multi-robot systems, and is considered a pioneering work in the field. For this research, she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers; she has also received many other awards for her teaching, research, and service. Dr. Parker has been active in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) for many years; she served as the General Chair for the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE RAS Conference Editorial Board, as an Administrative Committee Member of RAS, and as Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE).

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