Our own hero fighting against COVID at its US epicenter

[Howie Choset]

Hurray for Luke. He is amazing.

 

Howie

 

From: Artur Dubrawski <awd at cs.cmu.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 7:45 PM
To: users at autonlab.org
Cc: Farnam Jahanian <farnam at andrew.cmu.edu>; James H. Garrett, Jr. <garrett at cmu.edu>; Michael McQuade <mmcquade at andrew.cmu.edu>; Martial Hebert <hebert+ at cs.cmu.edu>; Srinivasa Narasimhan <srinivas at andrew.cmu.edu>; Byron Spice <bspice at cs.cmu.edu>; George Darakos <gdarakos at andrew.cmu.edu>; Cheryl Wehrer <wehrer at cmu.edu>; Howie Choset <choset at cs.cmu.edu>; Christopher Atkeson <cga at andrew.cmu.edu>; John Galeotti <jgaleotti at cmu.edu>; Luke Sciulli <lsciulli at andrew.cmu.edu>; Matty, Douglas M COL USARMY HQDA SECARMY (USA) <douglas.m.matty.mil at mail.mil>; Kliethermes, Kenneth J COL USARMY FUTURES COMMAND (USA) <kenneth.j.kliethermes.mil at mail.mil>
Subject: Our own hero fighting against COVID at its US epicenter

 

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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