Robotics and AI: New Perspectives was presented by the Lemelson Center on 1-4 November 2022. Check back soon for the session recordings.
Speakers
Christopher G. Atkeson, Professor, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Chris Atkeson is a professor in the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on developing humanoid and super-human robots. His work inspired aspects of the design of the character Baymax (an inflatable robot that takes care of people) in the Disney movie Big Hero 6. His life goal is to fulfill the science fiction vision of machines that achieve human levels of competence in perceiving, thinking, and acting.
Cynthia Breazeal, Director, Personal Robots Group, MIT Media Lab
Cynthia Breazeal is a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the Personal Robots Group. She serves as MIT’s dean for digital learning, and director of RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment). As a pioneer in social robotics and human-robot interaction, she also focuses on bringing AI education to all ages. Beginning in the 1990s, Breazeal applied theories about child development to her early robots Kismet and Leonardo, giving them expressive faces and voices that encouraged natural communication between people and machines. Kismet (from the Arabic for “fate”) could analyze a person’s voice and express an emotional response. Leonardo, named for the artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, could remember people’s faces and evaluate gestures and speech.
Meredith Broussard, Associate Professor, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University
Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2018). Her research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment at the NYU Center for Data Science, a 2019 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Institute of Museum & Library Services as well as the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and other outlets. Follow her on Twitter @merbroussard.
Sarah Dillon, Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities, University of Cambridge
Sarah Dillon is a professor of Literature and the Public Humanities, University of Cambridge. Recent books are Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (Routledge, 2021) and AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press, 2020). She has published articles on what AI researchers read, and on using a collaborative storytelling game to assess anticipatory assumptions about the futures of autonomous flight. She has published reports on Portrayals and Perceptions of AI and Why They Matter, and AI and Gender: 5 Proposals for Future Research, and was co-PI of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power.”
Bran Ferren, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, Applied Minds
Bran Ferren is a designer/technologist who invents and prototypes high-technology products and innovative concepts for the entertainment, aerospace, defense, intelligence, automotive, architecture, and consumer products sectors. He is the Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds and former President of Research & Development and Creative Technology for The Walt Disney Company. His expertise includes conceptual design, creative ideation, entertainment, and facility design. His work has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He’s given 250 keynote speeches and has 500 awarded and pending patents. Bran has been a senior advisory board member or consultant for science and advanced technology to numerous US government agencies and organizations.
Timnit Gebru, Founder and Executive Director, Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute
Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City, in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Gebru also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian high school students, free of charge.
Khari Johnson, Senior Writer, WIRED
Khari Johnson is a senior writer at WIRED, covering artificial intelligence and other stories at the intersection of technology, policy, and power. Before joining WIRED, Khari worked for VentureBeat, AOL’s Patch, Business 2.0 Magazine, and San Diego News Network, with additional contributions to publications like Real Future (now part of Univision), the San Francisco Chronicle, and Voice of San Diego. In 2014, Johnson created Through the Cracks, a multi-year project to explore how journalists and documentary makers use crowdfunding to support independent works. He also co-founded the Black Tech Writers community in 2021. Johnson is a member of Bay Area Storytellers of Color (BASC), the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Online News Association (ONA). He is based in Oakland, California.
Edward Jones-Imhotep, Associate Professor and Director, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto
Edward Jones-Imhotep is associate professor and director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) at the University of Toronto. His work specializes in the historical intersections of science, technology, and modern culture. His current research project—The Black Androids—explores how the social history of technology holds important lessons for current developments in robotics, AI, and the intersections of race and technology. He is the author of The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017), winner of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in History of Technology, and a co-founder of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, a public forum for humanities-based discussions about science and technology.
David Mindell, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, MIT
A professor of Aerospace Engineering at MIT, David Mindell is an expert on robotic navigation and human interactions with autonomous systems in air, sea, and space. As Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, he is a leading authority on generations of inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and workers within the great arcs of technological change that make them successful. He has led or participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions, written six books, and is an inventor on 34 patents in RF navigation, autonomous systems, and AI-assisted piloting. He also spent five years as a department head at MIT. Mindell co-chairs MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, and is the author, with David Autor and Elizabeth Reynolds, of The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT Press, 2022). He is also the founder and executive chair of Humatics Corporation, which develops technologies to transform how robots and autonomous systems work in human environments, and co-founder of Unless, an investment firm whose mission is to catalyze the new industrial revolution. Mindell holds undergraduate degrees from Yale and a PhD from MIT.
Dawn Nafus, Anthropologist and Senior Research Scientist, Intel
Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist and senior research scientist at Intel Labs, where she leads research that enables Intel to make socially-informed decisions about its products. Her work examines health and environmental sensing, and the relationship between AI development and climate change. She is the editor of Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2016), co-author of Self-Tracking (MIT Press, 2016), and co-editor of Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World (Manchester University Press, 2018). She serves on Intel’s Responsible AI Council and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
Nikolas Noel, Director of Marketing & Communications, Boston Dynamics
Nikolas Noel is the director of Marketing & Communications for Boston Dynamics, the global leader in advanced mobile robots. In this role, he drives communications and commercialization efforts for the company’s first two commercial robots: Spot, a quadruped used primarily for industrial equipment inspections, and Stretch, a box-moving robot for warehouse applications. He also supports R&D storytelling for Atlas, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot. Prior to his career in robotics, Noel spent 13 years at General Electric, where he led communications for the GE Current and GE Renewable Energy business units. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.
Jennifer Rhee, Associate Professor, Department of English, Virginia Commonwealth University
Jennifer Rhee is an associate professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has written about race, gender, and labor in robotics and artificial intelligence technologies in her book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), which was edited by a group of scholars working under the name The Triangle Collective. Her scholarship on artificial intelligence and on speculative fiction has also appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes.
Moderators
Arthur Daemmrich, Director, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Arthur Daemmrich is the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Located in the National Museum of American History, the Lemelson Center carries out research on invention and innovation through history, leads invention education programs to activate the next generation, and creates exhibits that engage some 4 million museum visitors annually. Daemmrich has led research projects analyzing pharmaceutical innovation and regulation, chemical risk, and healthcare systems, and is currently researching sports technology governance. He has published in the fields of science and technology studies, history of technology, and business policy. Previously an associate professor at the University of Kansas and assistant professor at Harvard Business School, he holds a PhD from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Andrew Meade McGee, Curator of Computing, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Andrew Meade McGee serves as curator of computing at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. A historian of the politics, culture, and business of digital technologies, he focuses on the policy, economic, social, and environmental frameworks that shaped modern information society. He researches how the intersections of governments, institutions, technologies, and markets in the task of managing information can structure public policy, shape culture, and remake the natural and man-made worlds. He previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and Washington and Lee University and held the Kluge Fellowship in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress.
Carlene Stephens, Curator, Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Carlene Stephens is a curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She oversees the museum’s historical collections of clocks and watches, robots and automatons, and acoustic sound recording technologies. She is the author of On Time: How America Learned to Live by the Clock (2002) and other publications related to the cultural history of timekeeping and time finding. Her recent exhibitions are Robots on the Road? about self-driving vehicles; Time and Navigation at the National Air and Space Museum; Hear My Voice, a display of objects and audio recovered from some of the earliest sound recordings ever made, all from Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory; and, most recently, Elephants and Us: Considering Extinction. She became involved with elephants at the Smithsonian in 2014 when she attempted to collect a marine timekeeper containing ivory, which had been on the HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin.
Margaret A. Weitekamp, Chair and Curator, Space History Department, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Margaret A. Weitekamp serves as chair for the Space History Department at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and curates the museum's social and cultural history of spaceflight collection of more than 5,000 artifacts that includes both space memorabilia and space science fiction objects. Her new book, Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Spaceflight (2022) is based on that collection. With Matthew Shindell, she has revised and expanded Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and Imagined(forthcoming 2023). She is the author of numerous scholarly articles as well as Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women in Space Program (2004). In addition, she wrote an award-winning children’s picture book, Pluto’s Secret: An Icy World’s Tale of Discovery (2013), in collaboration with David DeVorkin, with illustrations by Diane Kidd.
Circular image at top: Designed from artwork by Ralph McQuarrie in 1975, C-3PO’s costume from "Return of the Jedi," released in 1983, was worn by the actor Anthony Daniels, NMAH 1984.0302.02. © Smithsonian Institution; photo by Jaclyn Nash, NMAH-JN2018-00430-000001