The Dean’s Message

Gaurav S. Sukhatme is the Dean (Interim) of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Inaugural Director of the USC Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. He holds the Donald M. Aldstadt Chair in Advanced Computing and is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC. 

Dr. Sukhatme was the Executive Vice Dean of the USC Viterbi School from 2017-26, the Chairman of the Computer Science department from 2012-17 and an Amazon Scholar from 2000-25. He received a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1991, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from USC in 1993 and 1997.

He is the co-director of the USC Robotics Research Laboratory and the director of the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, which he founded in 2000. His research interests are in networked robots, learning robots and field robotics. He has published extensively in these and related areas.

Dr. Sukhatme has served as PI on numerous NSF, DARPA and NASA grants and was a Co-PI on the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center.

He is a Fellow of the AAAI, the IEEE, the AAAS, a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Okawa Foundation research award and an Amazon research award.

He is one of the founders of the Robotics: Science and Systems conference and served as its first Program Chair. He was Program Chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems - the two biggest annual conferences in robotics.

Dr. Sukhatme is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Autonomous Robots (Springer Nature).