Jeff Norris

Mark Powell

Speakers' biographies

Jeff Norris is a senior computer scientist in the Mobility Systems Concept Development Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and team lead for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Mission Science Activity Planner. Jeff is also the manager of the Maestro public outreach effort for the mission. He is currently a Tactical Activity Planner on the Integrated Sequencing Team for the Spirit Mars Rover and is responsible for the daily construction of the integrated rover activity plan. His research interests include collaborative, distributed operations for Mars rovers and landers, secure data distribution, science data visualization, and human/computer interaction. Norris has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and is working toward a PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California. Jeff lives with his wife Kamala and daughter Vivian in La Crescenta, CA.

Mark Powell is a member of the technical staff in the Mobility Systems Concept Development Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA since 2001. He received his B.S.C.S. in 1992, M.S.C.S in 1997, and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2000 from the University of South Florida, Tampa. His dissertation work was in the area of advanced illumination modeling; color and range image processing applied to robotics and medical imaging and received the award for Outstanding Dissertation from the University of South Florida. At JPL his area of focus is science data visualization and science planning for telerobotics. He is a member of the MER mission operations as a Science Downlink Coordinator, facilitating the timely downlink and assisting with the analysis of data from the Mars Exploration Rovers. He received the Imager of the Year award from Advanced Imaging Magazine for his work on the Science Activity Planner science visualization and activity planning software used for MER operations, and also for Maestro, the publicly available version of that same application. He, his wife Nina, and daughters Gwendolyn and Jacquelyn live in Tujunga, CA.

Marsette Vona is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT. As an employee at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from 2001 to 2003, he was a major contributor to the design and implementation of the Science Activity Planner (SAP), a data visualization and activity planning software system for robotic planetary exploration. SAP has been employed as an integral part of the daily science operations for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, and a version of SAP called Maestro was very successfully released to engage the public in the mission. Prior to JPL, Marsette received his M.S. in Computer Science at MIT in 2001, with a thesis in the area of precision dimensional metrology for machine tools. He completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in 1999, where he contributed significantly to the development of experimental robots that can mechanically change their shape in relatively general ways (so-called Self Reconfigurable robots). For this work, Marsette was awarded the 1999 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award. His current research seeks to apply knowledge about humans' perception, communication, and conceptualization of shape to improve the usability of mechanical CAD systems.