College of Engineering and Computing

The intersection of art and technology has long been a space for innovation, creativity, and exploration. At George Mason’s Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC) located within the College of Engineering and Computing, this connection has taken center stage with the Integrating Art and Tech Project.

Missy Cummings, a George Mason University mechanical engineering professor, calls herself a “tech futurist,” whose job is to “make tech work. It’s not to stop tech, it’s to help it get better.”

Missy Cummings, one of the country’s first female fighter pilots and the director of Mason’s autonomy and robotics center, calls herself a tech futurist, charged with making tech work and helping it get better. She isn’t shy about calling out bad tech either, including the vision systems in self-driving cars and Tesla’s Autopilot.

Missy Cummings is co-director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

Research Interests: Perception, tactile sensing, robotic manipulation

Research Interests: Field Robotics, Motion Planning, Machine Learning

Research Interests: Distributed learning for MAS, resilient multi-robot systems, distributed resource allocation, human-in-the-loop for MAS

Research Interests: Computer architecture, CMOS VLSI ASIC design, FPGA-based system design, and GPU architecture and programming

Research Interests: Human-robot interactions, human-robot co-learning, bio-inspired robotics, distributed resource allocation

Research Interests: Defense and aerospace systems, system of systems/ multi-robots, information fusion, test, evaluation, and explainable AI