Our own hero fighting against COVID at its US epicenter

[Artur Dubrawski]

Dear Autonians,

Many of you know Luke Sciulli. Some of you have not met him yet.

Luke joined the Lab in October last year as a senior analyst. He is a
retired Green Beret - a US Army special operations combat medic. He was
deployed and served in the harm's way multiple times. He was severely
injured in action in Afghanistan 2 years ago, amazingly survived the
ordeal, recovered from injury-induced paralysis and several other traumas,
and joined our team after returning to his home in Pittsburgh while
continuing his path towards full recovery. He is helping a lot with
multiple projects involving application of AI to healthcare. Most
obviously, he is the key resource in RoboTRAC/TRACIR projects which aim to
use robotics and AI to automate trauma care in the field, basically aiming
to create a robotic version of Luke. He is sharing a lot of first-hand
insights in the process, and that's invaluable.

Many of you know all that already, but I want to share another news about
Luke. He has recently learned that his fellow special operations medics and
doctors have spontaneously decided to organize and open an ad-hoc field
hospital in New York City. Luke could not imagine not being a part of it,
so he joined the endeavor as a volunteer some 12 days ago. So now he is
there, attending COVID patients who are in need of intensive care, taking
long-hour shifts at the ICU floor, while amazingly using his remaining
time to stay current with his primary CMU job duties. He is not only our
ears and eyes in the field of combat against COVID, constantly looking for
ideas on how we might creatively use AI and robotics to help the fight, but
he is now also serving as a supervisor of that hospital. I just wanted to
share with you all how proud I am for having Luke a part of our team. I
keep asking him to stay safe and healthy, and I sincerely hope he listens
to these requests, and that he will be back home soon and sound.

Cheers,
Artur

PS. Check out this video. It is relevant:
https://vimeo.com/410732813
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