Andrew B. Williams, Ph.D.

Andrew B. Williams, Ph.D.
Chair and Associate Professor
Director, Artificial Intelligence, Informatics, and Robotics (AIR) Lab
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Spelman College
williams at spelman.edu
http://www.spelman.edu/~williams
350 Spelman Lane SW, Box 217, Atlanta, GA 30314




Research and Teaching Interests
My research and teaching interests are in distributed artificial intelligence, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, cognitive robotics, and bioinformatics.

Education

SpelBots Robotics Team
I founded and continue to coach the SpelBots Robotics Team, the first all-women and African American undergraduate team to compete in the International RoboCup Four-Legged Soccer Competition in Osaka, Japan (2005) and Bremen, Germany (2006). We earned 2nd place in the RoboCup 2007 Atlanta Technical Challenge Passing Challenge event. In 2009 we accomplished a tie in the Championship match of the RoboCup Japan Open 2009 Osaka Standard Platform League Nao Humanoid robot soccer competition. Watch the video recap:

Advancing Technology for Societal Impact (ARTSI) Alliance
I am the Principal Investigator and Director for the ARTSI Alliance, an NSF Sponsored Program for encouraging African Americans to pursue computer science and engineering education in middle school, high school, and college. We are an alliance of twelve HBCUs and seven research institutions that develop educational and research projects centered around robotics and healthcare, the arts, and entrepreneurship. Find out more at http://www.artsialliance.org

Computer and Robotics Education (C.A.R.E.) for African American Students
I am the Principal Investigator for this National Science Foundation (NSF) Broadening Partipation in Computing funded project. This project is being conducted with Carnegie Mellon University and has three components: