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Jeff Norris

Address:

4800 Oak Grove Drive
M/S 301-250D
Pasadena, CA 91109

Phone:

818.354.5472

Fax:

818.393.5074
FORMER MEMBER

Dr. Jeff Norris

Supervisor, Planning Software Systems Group

Biography

Dr. Jeff Norris is the supervisor of the Planning Software Systems Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His group develops operations systems for a variety of space missions including the Phoenix Mars Scout, Cassini Saturn Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers-- for which his team was co-winner of the 2004 NASA Software of the Year Award.

Jeff is currently leading the development of the uplink system for the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory Rover mission and operations software development within NASA’s multi-center lunar Human Robotic Systems technology development project. He is also the operations lead for the DARPA F6 project.

Jeff founded the JPL OPS Lab, an advanced agile development facility for the design, development, and deployment of mission operations software and human-robot interaction technologies. Jeff helped operate the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers as a Tactical Activity Planner during the prime mission.

Education

Completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at USC under the advisement of Professor Maja Mataric' in May 2008 at the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. Dissertation title: Perceptually motivated symbol generation. Developed a system capable of automatically generating graphical symbols to represent discrete information and demonstrated through human subject trials that the generated symbols were superior to both random and some human-designed symbol sets. 3.95/4.0 GPA.

Graduated from MIT with a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in June 1999. Thesis title: Face recognition in office environments, advised by Professor Paul Viola. 3.8/4.0 GPA. Completed B.S. in Computer Science (concentration: Artificial Intelligence) and a minor in Music in June 1998. Elected member of Sigma Xi, research honorarium.