I decided to do a reading reflection on the seminar “Roving for a Better World (Dr. Ayanna Howard, 2019)”[1]. Here it is:
Summary
Dr. Ayanna Howard is a scientist who was hired by NASA at 27, working on very complex projects and creating a rover that landed on Mars. Later on, at Georgia Tech, she participated in the efforts of Arctic research, collaborating with climatologists to provide a solution to use rover robots in the snowy and cold environments where the scientists couldn’t consistently go. As a former NASA employee, she was also doing outreach for children and students where she discovered assistive technology. She talked about disability and how virtual reality, machine learning, and robotics can be helpful in terms of therapy. She also talked about image and emotion recognition and how it can be used, while also mentioning perception and bias that can occur while using these technologies.
Long Version
Dr. Ayanna Howard is a scientist who worked at NASA at the age of 27, leading the team that built the first successful Mars rover. After the end of her work with NASA due to research getting frozen, she started working at Georgia Tech to do research. She was in the process of finding a new area to apply her skills as an engineer and computer scientist to build robots to help with different aspects of science. At that point in time, she met with a climatologist who had been going to Antarctica every other year to collect data for his research. She started working with him to create a rover that would be deployed in Antarctica to collect data instead of sending scientists to a place with very low temperatures and hard living conditions. This led to many trials and errors to successfully create a robot that would accomplish the tasks the human scientists would be able to do. I learned a very important lesson from this point of her speech. She was basically saying that some requirements were not even mentioned to her team, such as the speed of the robot, so she had to redesign the whole robot to meet expectations that did not even exist in the first place. What I learned that was incredibly important is to always ask questions, even if they don’t make much sense. That way, you can figure out the things you don’t know that you don’t know.
As a former NASA employee, she was doing outreach to children and students to promote NASA. One of those events for her was doing summer camps for children, where she interacted with a visually impaired kid. Even though the kid was very smart, she still couldn’t engage with the learning material due to accessibility issues. This led Dr. Ayanna Howard to develop an interest in technology regarding pediatrics and disabilities, where she said it is very important because everybody will need these technologies when they are older. She backed this claim with data showing that the average time spent with disabilities in senior adults older than 70 years old is 8 years. By that, she proves that it’s everyone’s problem and that the technology to solve this problem is very important.
Dr. Ayanna Howard found out that technologies, such as virtual reality, are highly effective at keeping the user’s attention, making them perfect for therapies for people with disabilities. Usage of AI and machine learning also play a pivotal role in creating computer vision and image and emotion recognition models, which are important in accessibility technology. Dr. Howard expresses that the “future works” section in the thesis statements in graduate school plays a huge role in the advancement of technologies like AI as something that might not seem possible with today’s technology might be very achievable with future technology.
Dr. Howard also mentioned people’s perceptions about robots, claiming that people inherently trust robots even in very hard situations. She has shared an experiment proving that in her lecture, but she also expressed that she was able to break it by pushing the experiment too far, concluding that humans trust robots in very heard situations unless the situation is too crazy or unlogical. Dr. Howard also mentioned the bias that might happen in technologies like web scraping that is related to AI. She has expressed that the data set might not be fully diverse, resulting in bias.
Conclusion
This lecture was very interesting. It opened my mind about many aspects of research and robotics that I have not previously thought about before.
References
[1] A. Howard. (2020). Roving for a Better World [YouTube Video]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpjncBrHzzA
