Two Cornell engineering faculty members will participate in the National Academy of Engineering's 16th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium. Mark Campbell, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is an invited speaker, and Jonathan Butcher, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is invited as a general participant.

The symposium, to take place Sept. 23-25 in Armonk, N.Y., will examine cloud computing, autonomous aerospace systems, engineering and music, and engineering inspired by biology. Eighty-six of the nation's brightest young engineers have been selected to take part in the event.

Campbell's presentation will explore techniques for enabling intelligence in autonomous systems. He will talk about robots in complex environments, such as traveling over rough terrain or in the presence of moving objects, and connections between probabalistic perception and deterministic planning.

He also will address integration of humans into autonomous systems -- an area with immense potential. Such concepts as formally modeling human opinions and combining this input with traditional sensors will be explored; for example, deep space rovers fusing scientist information from Earth with local terrain information from sensors.

Butcher's expertise is in the symposium topic area of engineering inspired by biology -- in his case, development biology. His research focuses on understanding how mechanical forces drive heart and valve formation and remodeling. He then applies novel design principles to engineer naturally derived regenerative strategies to target these vital organs.

Participants in Frontiers of Engineering range in age from 30-45 and come from industry, academia and government. They were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations and chosen from approximately 265 applicants.

For more information: http://www.nae.edu/frontiers