Gearing Up for Robo Madness West on April 7: Here’s the Agenda

Robots and jobs. Robots and Steve Jobs. Robots and Steve Cousins. The cousins of all your favorite robots.

Please forgive the word association frenzy. But all will be on display (or be discussed) on Tuesday, April 7, at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. That afternoon, Xconomy is organizing its fourth annual Robo Madness West forum. (This year we added “West” to avoid confusion with our East Coast event this month.)

You can check out the full program for Robo Madness West here. As in recent years, the agenda will include spotlight talks, spirited panels and chats, and plenty of networking time as our speakers and attendees map out the future of robotics from commercial, investor, and startup points of view. As you can see, the sectors represented are quite broad.

Just a few highlights:

—Jim McCollum from Restoration Robotics will talk about lessons from building his company in the hair-transplant and medical sector. Restoration has raised more than $100 million in venture funding since its inception.

—Roger Hine from Liquid Robotics will talk about solving critical problems with ocean robots.

—Rich Mahoney of SRI International will give his unique perspective on recent advances in robotics and the future of the industry.

—Steve Cousins of Savioke will talk about some of the new robots his team has been working on. (One of these is an upgraded delivery robot for hotels, called Relay. I’d like to know if it still does its little dance.)

—We’ll have startup and innovation panels featuring folks like Melonee Wise of Fetch Robotics, David Cann of Double Robotics, Alex Vardakostas from Momentum Machines, Bilal Zuberi from Lux Capital, Ryan Kuder from the Qualcomm Robotics Accelerator/Techstars, and Kyle Vogt from Cruise Automation.

—Jacob Rosen from Applied Dexterity and UCLA will present a special demo of the Raven tele-surgical robot.

We’ll also be giving away three Roombas to lucky audience members, courtesy of iRobot. But you have to be there to win—tickets have gone fast, but you can still grab one here. Xconomy and SRI look forward to seeing you on April 7.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.