In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2021-2022 ACM Athena Lecturer Ayanna Howard, Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University and founder and President of the Board of Directors of Zyrobotics. Previously she was chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing, where she founded and led the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS). Before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). She is a Fellow of AAAI and IEEE. Among her many honors, Howard received the Computer Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award and the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award. Forbes named her to its America's Top 50 Women in Tech list.
In the interview Ayanna looks back on her early love of robotics, inspired by science fiction, teaching herself how to program, and working a high school job at the California Institute of Technology. She shares some of her favorite research projects at JPL, where she designed expert systems, and describes the transition from government/industrial work to academia. She also talks about AI challenges relating to training models and large-scale deployment of lab-tested algorithms—offering warnings for technologists—as well as some potential solutions from her research. Rashmi and Ayanna also touch on her company, Zyrobotics, which develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with special needs, and her book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI.
Francesca Rossi - Episode 53
Partha Talukdar - Episode 52
Rosalind Picard - Episode 51
Edward Y. Chang - Episode 50
Jacki O'Neill - Episode 49
Ranveer Chandra - Episode 48
Yael Tauman Kalai - Episode 47
Noriko Arai - Episode 46
Eugenio Zuccarelli - Episode 45
Regina Barzilay - Episode 44
Kush Varshney - Episode 43
Anima Anandkumar - Episode 42
Mor Peleg - Episode 41
Robert Metcalfe - Episode 40
H.-S. Philip Wong - Episode 39
Pattie Maes - Episode 38
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman- Episode 37
Holly Urban - Episode 36
Pat Pataranutaporn - Episode 35
Team V Bionic - Episode 34
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