Dr Chris McMurrough

[Dr Christopher Dale McMurrough]

Associate Professor of Instruction, Computer Science and Engineering

Last Updated: September 22, 2021

mcmurrough@uta.edu

about me

Research Interests

Robotics, computer vision, eye tracking, Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs)

Teaching Interests

Entrepreneurship, makerspaces, practical skills

Biography

Christopher D. McMurrough is a developer of perceptual computing techniques for intelligent robotic systems in a wide range of applications and environments. He has experience working with UAV/UGV systems, Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), industrial automation, embedded development, real-time applications, 3D perception / machine vision, and assistive devices for users with severe physical disabilities.

Dr. McMurrough's main teaching responsibilities center around senior capstone courses and student project mentoring in the College of Engineering. He is especially interested in multidisciplinary projects with local impact, as well as engineering entrepreneurship.

As an Arlington native and STEM education advocate, he is an active community volunteer and regular guest speaker at local K-12 schools.

Education

- 2013 PhD in Computer Science Engineering
  The University of Texas at Arlington
- 2010 MS in Computer Science Engineering
  The University of Texas at Arlington
- 2008 BS in Computer Science Engineering
  The University of Texas at Austin

Awards and Honors

- Apr 2020 Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching sponsored by The University of Texas at Arlington
- Feb 2020 College of Engineering Teaching Award sponsored by The University of Texas at Arlington - College of Engineering
- Jan 2009 National Instruments Graphical Design Achievement Multicore Award sponsored by NI Week conference

News Articles

- Feb 2021 Down To Business Episode 8 - Chris McMurrough
  Interview with Downtown Arlington Management Corporation regarding tech entrepreneurship and mentorship in Arlington.
- July 2018 Inspired by Own Family's Struggles, UTA Researcher Seeks to Improve Life for ALS Patients, Families
  News story about patented eye tracking headset and related 3D sensing technologies for users with ALS.

Publications

2013

Journal Article
A dataset for point of gaze detection using head poses and eye images
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Metsis, Vangelis, Kosmopoulos, Dimitrios, Maglogiannis, Ilias, Makedon, Fillia]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12193-013-0121-4
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12193-013-0121-4

2018

Conference Proceeding
Leveraging Industry Sponsorship as a Catalyst for Transformational Change in a Computer Science & Engineering Senior Capstone Design Program
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Conly, Christopher].

2015

Conference Proceeding
A review and quantitative comparison of methods for kinect calibration
Proceedings of the 2nd international Workshop on Sensor-based Activity Recognition and Interaction - WOAR '15
[Xiang, Wei, Conly, Christopher, McMurrough, ChristopherD., Athitsos, Vassilis]. 1--6. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2790044.2790056
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2790044.2790056

2013

Conference Proceeding
A Development and Evaluation Platform for Non-Tactile Power Wheelchair Controls
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Ranatunga, Isura, Papangelis, Alexandros, Popa, DanO., Makedon, Fillia]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2504335.2504339

Conference Proceeding
An Assistive Object Manipulation System
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments - PETRA '13
[Papangelis, Alexandros, McMurrough, ChristopherD., Ranatunga, Isura, Makedon, Fillia]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2504335.2504401

Conference Proceeding
Development of An Omniwheel-based Holonomic Robot Platform for Rough Terrain
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Enotiades, Harris, Phan, Scott, Savoie, Stephen, Makedon, Fillia]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2504335.2504398

2012

Conference Proceeding
3D point of gaze estimation using head-mounted RGB-D cameras
Proceedings of the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility - ASSETS '12
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Conly, Christopher, Athitsos, Vassilis, Makedon, Fillia]. 283. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2384916.2384994
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2384916.2384994

Conference Proceeding
A Survey of Assistive Devices for Cerebral Palsy Patients
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments - PETRA '12
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Papangelis, Alexandros, Boisselle, Angie]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2413097.2413119

Conference Proceeding
An eye tracking dataset for point of gaze detection
Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications - ETRA '12
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Metsis, Vangelis, Rich, Jonathan, Makedon, Fillia]. 305. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2168556.2168622
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2168556.2168622

Conference Proceeding
Low-cost Head Position Tracking for Gaze Point Estimation
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments - PETRA '12
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Rich, Jonathan, Metsis, Vangelis, Nguyen, An, Makedon, Fillia]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2413097.2413125

Conference Proceeding
Multi-modal interfaces for control of assistive robotic devices
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Multimodal interaction - ICMI '12
[McMurrough, ChristopherD.]. 329. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2388676.2388749
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2388676.2388749

Conference Proceeding
Multi-modal object of interest detection using eye gaze and RGB-D cameras
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction - Gaze-In '12
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., Rich, Jonathan, Conly, Christopher, Athitsos, Vassilis, Makedon, Fillia]. 1--6. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2401836.2401838
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2401836.2401838

2011

Conference Proceeding
Bilingual Corpus for AVASR using Multiple Sensors and Depth Information
Auditory-Visual Speech Processing 2011
[Galatas, Georgios, Potamianos, Gerasimos, Kosmopoulos, Dimitrios, McMurrough, ChristopherD., Makedon, Fillia]. Volterra, Italy: "ISCA International Speech Communication Association".

Conference Proceeding
Comparing gesture recognition accuracy using color and depth information
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments - PETRA '11
[Doliotis, Paul, Stefan, Alexandra, McMurrough, ChristopherD., Eckhard, David, Athitsos, Vassilis]. 1. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2141622.2141647
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2141622.2141647

Conference Proceeding
iDog : An Assistive-Guide Robot for the Visually Impaired
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments - PETRA '11
[Galatas, Georgios, McMurrough, ChristopherD., Mariottini, GianLuca, Makedon, Fillia]. 1. New York, New York, USA: "ACM Press". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2141622.2141691
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2141622.2141691

2009

Conference Proceeding
Developing a Real-Time MAV Flight Control System Test Bed Using NI LabVIEW and PXI
NI Week
[McMurrough, ChristopherD., French, Kyle, Doman, DavidB.].
http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-12086

Conference Proceeding
Discrete event command and control for networked teams with multiple missions
Proceedings of SPIE
[Lewis, FrankL., Hudas, GregR., Pang, CheeKhiang, Middleton, MatthewB., McMurrough, ChristopherD.]. 7332, 73320V--73320V--15. "SPIE". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.819326
http://link.aip.org/link/PSISDG/v7332/i1/p73320V/s1\&Agg=doi

Conference Proceeding
Mechanical fault diagnosis using wireless sensor networks and a two-stage neural network classifier
2009 IEEE Aerospace conference
[Ballal, P., Ramani, A., Middleton, M., McMurrough, ChristopherD., Athamneh, A., Lee, W., Kwan, C., Lewis, F.]. 1--10. "IEEE". DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2009.4839671
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/lpdocs/epic03/wrapper.htm?arnumber=4839671

2013

Other
Hardware and Software Systems for Control of Assistive Robotic Devices Using Point-of-Gaze Estimation
[McMurrough, ChristopherD.].(December), "The University of Texas at Arlington".

2010

Other
Real Time Hardware And Software Systems For Micro Air Vehicle Flight Control Testing
[McMurrough, ChristopherD.].(May), "The University of Texas at Arlington".
http://dspace.uta.edu/handle/10106/4891

Courses

Service to the University

- 2018 to Present Director
  
  CSE/EE Makerspace
  Overseeing implementation and operation of CSE/EE Makerspace.
- 2016 to Present Faculty Advisor
  
  HackUTA Hackathon
  Faculty advisor for UTA's 24-hour "HackUTA" Hackathon
- 2015 to Present Director
  
  CSE Senior Design
  Responsible for mentoring student projects, developing industry / university partnerships through sponsored student projects, and maintaining / procuring equipment for 2 semester capstone course sequence.
- 2009 to 2011 Competition Referee & Course Builder
  
  UTA College of Engineering
  Served as referee for UTA College of Engineering annual high school robot competition. Constructed competition arenas during 2010 event.

Service to the Profession

- Jan 2010 to Present
  Program Organizer
  IEEE
  o Organized 2009 IEEE Region 5 Student Robotics Competition hosted by UTA o Developed unique rules and constructed competition arenas for undergraduate teams o Managed 40+ competition teams during IEEE Region 5 annual conference
- Jan 2006 to 2008
  Co-founder & Team Leader
  IEEE
  o Served as team lead of UTA IEEE undergraduate robotics competition team o Developed autonomous material handling robots for each annual event o Placed 3rd out of 30+ teams during 2006 event, winning cash prize for UTA IEEE chapter o Organized team road trips to San Antonio, TX, Fayeteville, AR, and Kansas City, KA

Service to the Community

- 2019 to Present
  Member (Arlington, Texas,
  Rotary Club of Arlington
- 2018 to Present
  Board Member (Arlington, Texas,
  Arlington Tomorrow Foundation Citizen's Advisory Board
- 2014 to Present
  Guest Speaker (Arlington, Texas,
  Arlington Independent School District
  Regular guest speaker at various K-12 schools advocating for STEM career paths.

Faculty & Staff Resources