Kevin H. Knuth, Ph.D., President
Kevin H. Knuth received his Ph.D. in Physics with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1991. Dr. Knuth's Ph.D. thesis focused on biophysics and the understanding of the human auditory system.
In 1996 he was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kresge Hearing Research Laboratory in New Orleans LA, and continued his postdoctoral studies in the Department of Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx NY and at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City NY.
From 1998 to 1999 Dr. Knuth was an instructor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University where he worked in a group led by Dr. Daniel Gardner to design databases for neuroscience data for the National Institute of Health. The result is http://neurodatabase.org. Dr. Knuth contributed significantly to all aspects of the project: the database philosophy, the design of the metadata structures, the design of the user interfaces, as well as the coding of the first-generation of the operational server-side code. In addition, he contributed to the development of BrainML, which is an XML metaformat for exchanging neuroscience data: http://BrainML.org
He later served as a Research Scientist at the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging at the Nathan Kline Institute in Orangeburg NY, where he developed algorithms for electroencepholographic (EEG) data analysis and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
He took his practical knowledge of the workings of human sensory perception and cognition to NASA where he worked as a Research Scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View CA. There he worked for fours years from 2001 to 2005 designing machine learning algorithms for data analysis in NASA's Earth and Space missions. While at NASA, he introduce the concept of a symbiotic instrument-analysis system where the instrument interacts in real time with the data analysis algorithms. In a collaboration with Dr. Arsen Hajian at the United States Naval Observatory, these concepts were demonstrated on a Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) that was able to self-calibrate while collecting data.
In 2005 Dr. Knuth joined the University at Albany faculty in a joint appointment to the Departments of Physics and Informatics. Dr. Knuth's experience in robotics extends back into his high school days when he worked to design one of the first robots made entirely by high school students in 1983. Today he works to extend his NASA research to develop robots and intelligent instruments that design their own experiments, analyze their own data, and self-calibrate, all in real-time. The first demonstration of such a system was an intelligent robotic arm that has been programmed to identify and characterize shapes on a playing field using only a simple light sensor. In September of 2008, he demonstrated this system at the Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. The presentation slides can be found here on the NASA Dashlink site. Additional efforts include improving sensor efficacy by combining data from multiple sources (sensor fusion), navigational autonomy, and robotic vision.