Keith J. O'Hara

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. My research interests include robotics, multi-agent systems (particularly, multi-robot systems and sensor networks), artificial intelligence, computing education, and software systems. Robotics, and especially multi-robot systems, combine my interests in Systems and Artificial Intelligence nicely. I believe robotics and AI are the most exciting areas of computing in terms of education, research, and application.

I am from Gibbstown, a small town in southern New Jersey. My undergraduate degree is in computer science from Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ). I love music and playing guitar, reading (especially about stuff like evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of mind), watching movies, and competing at local trivia venues. More than anything, I enjoy spending time with my dog, my family, and with my wife, Mary.

At Rowan I was involved in a couple of educational robotics projects with Prof. Jennifer Kay, mostly aimed at developing open-source tools for educational robotics. I enjoyed many great summers interning at Lockheed Martin - Advanced Technology Laboratories in the Distributed Processing Lab working with distributed real-time systems, in particular, real-time Linux variations, real-time middleware, and real-time java.