Former St. Patrick School student presents robotics research in security at international conferences


Ruffin James White-Magner ...

Speaking on robotics research in security ... Waukon native and former St. Patrick School student Ruffin James White-Magner is pictured above making a presentation in Hamburg, Germany in 2015. He is speaking this week at two international conferences in Madrid, Spain on his robotics research in security. Submitted photo.

Ruffin James White-Magner, 27-year-old son of Mary Jane White and James W. Magner of Waukon who attended St. Patrick School in Waukon from Kindergarten through seventh grade, is speaking about his robotics research in security at two international conferences in Madrid, Spain held between September 29 and October 5.

His first presentation, “Leveraging Data Distribution Service Security in Robot Operating System 2,” was at the Robot Operating System Convention (ROSCon), an international annual gathering where he has presented earlier research in Vancouver, Canada (2017), in Seoul, Korea (2016) and in Hamburg, Germany (2015).

White-Magner’s second presentation, “Secure Robotic Operating System 2, Securing Robotics,” a four-hour tutorial, was one of eight proposals selected to be presented at the larger Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Robotics and Automation Society’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, where he also presented a scientific paper on the same subject with his collaborators from Venice, Italy and his PhD thesis advisor, Dr. Henrik Christensen of the University of California San Diego.  Dr. Christensen is the author of the United States national roadmap for the future of robotic research.

The Robot Operating System, which originated at Stanford University, is a standard code library used in research, education and industry to run robots ranging from those used in school robotics competitions to NASA’s Mars Rovers. White-Magner’s original security and secure transport contributions to the official open source libraries for Robot Operating System 1 and the Gazebo Simulation program have now been downloaded around the world over eight million times by international roboticists who want to safely explore new robotic code and software for their own research and product development.

Videos of White-Magner’s presentations are preserved on the internet at https://roscon.ros.org/2018/ and https://ruffs!.github.io/IROS2018 SROS2 Tutorial/ and are available on YouTube.

White-Magner’s early interest in computers was supported by his teachers and principals at St. Patrick School, who allowed him as a fifth through seventh grade student to open and set up newly arriving computers for the school’s computer lab.