Rocket Science and the Republic
Jeff Norris
Making With Eclipse · Keynote
Wednesday, 09:00, 50 minutes | Grand Ballroom
Tags: Emerging Technology , UI / RCP
Jeff Norris
Plato taught that civilization is born of the necessity to specialize and cooperate. Through specialization and cooperation, our civilization gave birth to agriculture, writing, and (a few years later) open-source development platforms and space exploration. Every NASA mission is accomplished by a civilization of specialists in every field from celestial navigation to software development. For the past five years, NASA has also been supported by the specialists behind the Eclipse platform. With Eclipse, they've built dozens of tools to fly spacecraft, drive robots, and improve humanity's understanding of the universe.
In this talk, Dr. Norris will describe and demonstrate some of the latest systems that NASA has built on top of Eclipse and the technologies they are leveraging from the platform. He will also describe how NASA came to Eclipse and found its role as an application developer within the community. If you're building an application on top of Eclipse, considering it, or if you think that robots and spaceships are cool, this talk is for you!
Dr. Jeff Norris is the supervisor of the Planning Software Systems Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His group develops operations systems for a variety of space missions including the Phoenix Mars Scout, Cassini Saturn Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers-- for which his team was co-winner of the 2004 NASA Software of the Year Award. He is currently leading the development of the uplink system for the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory Rover mission and operations software development within NASA’s multi-center lunar Human Robotic Systems technology development project. Jeff founded the JPL OPS Lab, an advanced agile development facility for the design, development, and deployment of mission operations software and human-robot interaction technologies. Jeff helped operate the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers as a Tactical Activity Planner during the prime mission. He received Bachelor's and Masters degrees in Computer Science from MIT, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and lives with his wife and two children near Pasadena, CA.