Introduction

I'm Curtis Nielsen, I work with a robotics group at the Idaho National Laboratory. I would say my job is to play with cool technology and try to get it working with robots. By trade I am a computer scientist, I received my degrees at BYU-Provo under the direction of Mike Goodrich. Most of my work focuses on making robots easier to use by developing interfaces that present the right amount of information that enable decision making, but not too much information that would require the operator to sift through the visualization, rather we try to make the relevant data immediately perceptible. In general, my interests are related to usability and improving the way things are used especially computers and applications. I really enjoy writing software especially when it is beautiful to both the user and the developer. For the user it is intuitive and easy to use, for the developer it is easy to update and extend. For more information about the type of robotics work we do see www.inl.gov/adaptiverobotics.