The Institute for Personal Robotics in Education (IPRE), a joint effort of the College of Computing, Microsoft Research, and Bryn Mawr College, received the "Technical Innovation Award for Educational Impact" at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Robot Competition & Exhibition held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from July 22-26, 2007.

The IPRE was created to make education more fun and effective through the use of personal robots. IPRE is hosted at Georgia Tech with Bryn Mawr College, and initially supported by seed funds for 3 years from Microsoft Research and the schools themselves. As well as developing the technology to be used in classrooms, leveraging the best available commercial and non-commercial components as appropriate (including MSRS, Microsoft Robotics Studio), IPRE will rigorously assess the effectiveness of the approach. The results of this research will be widely published through regular academic channels.

The award was accepted by Stewart Tansley, a program manager in External Research & Programs at Microsoft Research, on behalf of the entire IPRE initiative. The IPRE presentation included demonstrations of the currently available hardware and software, and the preliminary results and status after the pilot teaching trials in the past Spring Semester.

Founded in 1979, the Association for the AAAI (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society composed of thousands of AI scientists, researchers, students, and professions from most countries in the world.

For More Information:
IPRE website
AAAI website