Lamia Alsalloom is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Air Lab in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Sebastian Scherer, she is also a Master’s student in the Computer Vision program (MSCV). Her research focuses on thermal infrared scene reconstruction, generative diffusion modeling, 3D Gaussian splatting for volumetric mapping, physics guided 3D modeling, and multimodal vision-language integration. Prior to CMU, she spent over five years as a Senior AI Engineer developing security focused vision systems, optimizing large‑scale neural networks, and advancing distributed training methodologies.
Prof. Sebastian Scherer is an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research focuses on enabling autonomy for unmanned rotorcraft to operate at low altitude in cluttered environments. He and His team have shown the fastest and most tested obstacle avoidance on an Yamaha RMax (2006), the first obstacle avoidance for micro aerial vehicles in natural environments (2008), and the first (2010) and fastest (2014) automatic landing zone detection and landing on a full-size helicopter. Dr. Scherer received his B.S. in Computer Science, M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from CMU in 2004, 2007, and 2010. He is a Siebel scholar and a recipient of multiple paper awards and nominations, including AIAA@Infotech 2010 and FSR 2013. His research has been covered by the national and internal press including IEEE Spectrum, the New Scientist, Wired, der Spiegel, and the WSJ. His work on self-landing helicopters has received the Popular Science Best of What’s New 2010 Award and in Fall 2016 he demonstrated his inspection robots to President Obama.