Steven M. LaValle

Biography

Steven M. LaValle is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, in Particular Robotics and Virtual Reality, at the University of Oulu since 2018.  Since 2001, he has also been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.  He has previously held positions at Stanford University and Iowa State University.  His research interests include robotics, virtual and augmented reality, sensing, planning algorithms, computational geometry, and control theory.  In research, he is mostly known for his introduction of the Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm, which is widely used in robotics and other engineering fields.  In industry, he was an early founder and chief scientist of Oculus VR, acquired by Facebook in 2014, where he developed patented tracking technology for consumer virtual reality and led a team of perceptual psychologists to provide principled approaches to virtual reality system calibration, health and safety, and the design of comfortable user experiences.  From 2016 to 2017, he was Vice President and Chief Scientist of VR/AR/MR at Huawei Technologies, Ltd.  He has authored the books Planning Algorithms, Sensing and Filtering, and Virtual Reality.  He currently leads an Advanced Grant project from the European Research Council on the Foundations of Perception Engineering.

Learn more about Steven M. LaValle and his work at https://lavalle.pl/index.html