IAAC – Master in Robotics and Advanced Construction
Applied Theory III – Master class
Faculty & Curated by: Mathilde Marengo

Invited speaker: Mary Katherine Heinrich
Topic: Human-Machine Collaboration

Mary Katherine Heinrich received her Ph.D. from the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA), KADK, Copenhagen, Denmark; MAI from IAAC; and B.Sc. from the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA. Her Ph.D. was part of the EU H2020 Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) project flora robotica, which investigated the combination of organised processes seen in natural plants and in groups of robots, for the task of construction. flora robotica involved distributed robotics, bio-hybrid robotics, evolutionary robotics, machine learning, bio-inspired robot control, plant science, mechatronics, and architecture and construction.

During the Ph.D., Heinrich was also a recurring visiting researcher at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), Cambridge, MA, USA, and a short-term visiting researcher at the building science Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID), EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. During the flora robotica project activities, she also was a visitor to labs at collaborating universities, including the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University, Germany, and the Artificial Life Lab at Karl Franzens University Graz, Austria.

From 2018 to 2019, Heinrich was a research associate working on swarm robotics at the Service Robotics group, Institute of Computer Engineering, University of Lübeck, Germany. Since 2019, she has been a postdoctoral researcher working on swarm intelligence at IRIDIA, the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium. Her topics of interest include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, bio-hybrid robotics, construction automation, complex systems, and human-computer and human-robot interaction.