IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Magazine - January 2023 - 69

Meet Our Volunteers
by Haibin Zhu
T
he following Executive Committee
members of the IEEE
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
Society (SMCS) were elected on
9 October 2022 during the Board
of Governors meeting (hybrid), in
Prague, Czech Republic. The President-Elect
will become President
from January 1, 2024 and the Vice
Presidents' terms are from 1 January
2023 to 31 December 2024.
Adrian Stoica
President-Elect
Adrian Stoica is a
senior
research
Adrian Stoica
scientist and principal
at the NASA
Jet Propu l s ion
Laboratory (JPL),
Cal ifornia Institute
of Technology
(Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA.
Owned by NASA and managed by
Caltech, the JPL has more than 6,000
scientists, engineers, and technologists
and is NASA's lead center for robotic
space exploration. Best known
for its robotic Mars missions, the JPL
also built the first U.S. satellite, Explorer
1, the two Voyager spacecraft
now in interstellar space, and many
other robotic spacecraft that have visited
all the planets in our solar system.
Dr. Stoica earned his degree in
electrical and electronics engineering
from the Technical University of Iasi
(TUI), Romania, in 1986. He worked
in the industry and as a research and
teaching assistant at TUI. Between
1992 and 1995, he pursued his Ph.D.
degree in robot learning at Victoria
University in Melbourne, Australia.
His Ph.D. thesis, " Motion Learning by
Robot Apprentices-A Fuzzy-Neural
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSMC.2022.3222673
Date of current version: 10 January 2023
Getting to Know
Our Volunteers
Approach, " was a pioneering work in
imitation learning for anthropomorphic
robots.
At JPL since 1996, Dr. Stoica
worked for 12 years in the Avionics Section,
developing advanced autonomy
technologies for future space systems.
He led many projects for NASA and
the Department of Defense, focusing
on very large-scale integration VLSI
computational intelligence engines and
providing survivable electronics for
spacecraft operating in extreme temperatures
and radiation environments.
On five occasions, Dr. Stoica was the
principal investigator for DARPA-funded
projects. In 2008, he became supervisor
of the Robotics Systems, Estimation
and Control Group in the Robotics
Section. He served in this role until
2018, managing a group that developed
and implemented autonomous rover
navigation for Mars Rovers. During
this time, he also won NASA Innovative
Advanced Concepts awards and developed
concepts and technologies for the
Moon and for Jupiter. After 2018, Dr.
Stoica served in several program management
roles and currently supports
the Office of Strategic Planning, where
he leads strategic programs, and the
Office of the Chief Technologist, where
he has been involved in the selection of
proposals for internal JPL funding.
Dr. Stoica's technical contributions
are in the areas of intelligent
techniques for autonomy, human-robot
interfaces, multirobot coordination,
biometrics, and space robotics.
He has provided keynotes and invited
addresses on the topics and served on
government and academic advisory
bodies. He has collaborated with academic
colleagues in North America,
Europe, Asia, and Australia and held
several visiting and adjunct academic
appointments in Australia, the United
Kingdom, and Japan.
Dr. Stoica served as program chair
at the 2021 IEEE International Conference
on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
(SMC 2021); coordinator for the
Human-Machine Systems Area; coordinator
and later as vice president
(VP) for Membership and Student
Activities (2017-2018); and VP for Systems
Science and Engineering (SSE)
2019-2020. Dr. Stoica is also chair of
the IEEE Future Directions Project on
Telepresence and will serve as general
chair of SMC 2023, to be held in Maui,
HI, USA. He is currently the SMCS
president-elect and will serve as president
during the 2024-2025 term.
Mariagrazia Dotoli
VP Membership and
Student Activities
Mariagrazia Dotoli
(http://dclab.poli
ba.it/people/maria
g r a z i a - dot ol i / )
earned her Ph.D.
degree in electrical
engineer ing
and is a full professor
in automatic
Mariagrazia
Dotoli
January 2023 IEEE SYSTEMS, MAN, & CYBERNETICS MAGAZINE
69
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1922-1631 http://dclab.poliba.it/people/mariagrazia-dotoli/ http://dclab.poliba.it/people/mariagrazia-dotoli/ http://dclab.poliba.it/people/mariagrazia-dotoli/
IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Magazine - January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Magazine - January 2023
