Women In Robotics – Robohub

50 women in robotics you need to know about 2023

Women In Robotics — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 16:50:34 +0000

In celebration of the launch of International Women in Robotics Day, the Women in Robotics organization is proud to release another “50 women in robotics you need to know about” collection of stories. With a growing robotics industry there are many opportunities for everyone to get involved. This is why we showcase the wide range of roles that women play in robotics today.

Since 2012, the Women in Robotics organization has released a list of women building the future in robotics. The list has covered all ages, career stages, types of occupation and experience. We’ve featured more than 350 women already and we’ve shown that women have always been working in the robotics industry, in the earliest robotics research labs and companies, although those stories have often been forgotten.

This year’s collection includes Nancy Cornelius, co-founder of Boston Dynamics and the first engineer hired. Cornelius remained an integral part of Boston Dynamics until the company was sold to Google in 2013. Vandi Verma is the head of NASA’s rover (robot) program. Joanna Buttler is the head of the Global Autonomous Technology Group for Daimler Truck. And Whitney Rockley founded a venture capital company investing exclusively in ‘industrial internet’ companies like Clearpath Robotics.

For the first time, we feature an Indigenous (Ojibwe) American roboticist, Danielle Boyer. Boyer started a non-profit The STEAM Connection to combat the difficulties that many kids have getting access to robotics. She created an affordable robot kit that’s been distributed to thousands of students, and is proudest of the SKOBOT project. Personalized robots that keep culture and language traditions alive. Boyer epitomizes the motto “Building the Future”.

We also try to feature women from all regions of the world and this year’s collection represents Nigeria, India, China, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Croatia, Korea, Denmark, Singapore, Italy, Romania, United States, Sweden, Spain, Canada, the UK, Israel, Austria, Belgium, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. There is an active Latinx community in Women in Robotics engaged in translating more robotics information into Spanish, hoping to create more connections between the global robotics community and the roboticists, and potential roboticists, of Latin America.

There have always been women doing great things in robotics! And we’re pleased to present another collection of strong female role models for young and upcoming roboticists (of any gender).

You can also join in the Women in Robotics celebrations today and throughout October, with events listed on the women in robotics site, like Diversity Cocktails at the IROS conference in Detroit, or the launch of the Los Angeles women in robotics chapter. Women in Robotics is a global community organization for women and non-binary people working in robotics and those who’d like to work in robotics. Learn more at https://womeninrobotics.org

Join our events, host your own events, share our celebration on social media!

Holiday robot wishlist for/from Women in Robotics

Women In Robotics — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 11:07:37 +0000

Are you looking for a gift for the women in robotics in your life? Or the up and coming women in robotics in your family? Perhaps these suggestions from our not-for-profit Women in Robotics organization will inspire! We hope these are also good suggestions for non binary people in robotics, and I personally reckon they are ideal for men in the robotics community too. It’s all about the robotics, eh!

Plus OMG it’s less than 50 days until 2023!!! So we’re going to do a countdown with a social media post every day until Dec 31st featuring one of the recent ’50 women in robotics you need to know about 2022′. It’s in a random order and today we have…

…. Follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, on Linked In, Pinterest or Instagram to find out

Holiday gift ideas

Visit the Women in Robotics store for t-shirts, mugs, drink bottles, notebooks, stickers, tote bags and more!

From Aniekan @_aniekan_

Creating your first package in ROS

From @mdn_nrbl

Arduino Uno

From Vanessa Van Decker @VanessaVDecker

From Andra @robotlaunch

Xena Workwear – Stylish Women’s Safety Boots
and many many books (or videos) by and about women in robotics and AI….

Do you have a great robot gift idea?

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50 women in robotics you need to know about 2022

Women In Robotics — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 06:59:02 +0000

Our Women in Robotics list turns 10 this year and we are delighted to introduce you to another amazing “50 women in robotics you need to know about” as we also celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. We have now profiled more than 300 women AND non-binary people making important contributions to robotics since the list began in 2013. This year our 50 come from robotics companies (small and large), self-driving car companies, governments, research organizations and the media. The list covers the globe, with the chosen ones having nationalities from the EU, UK, USA, Australia, China, Turkey, India and Kenya. A number of women come from influential companies that are household names such as NASA, ABB, GE, Toyota and the Wall Street Journal. As the number of women on the list grows so does the combined global impact of their efforts, increasing the visibility of women in the field who may otherwise go unrecognized. We publish this list to overcome the unconscious perception that women aren’t making significant contributions. We encourage you to use our lists to help find women for keynotes, panels, interviews and to cite their work and include them in curricula.

The role models these 50 women represent are diverse, ranging from emeritus to early career stage. Role models are important. Countess Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer and an extraordinary mathematician, faced an uphill battle in the days when women were not encouraged to pursue a career in science. Fast forward 200 years and there are still not enough women in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). One key reason is clear: the lack of visible female role models and so we continue to run our women in robotics photo challenge, to showcase real women building real robots. Women in STEM need to be equally represented at conferences, keynotes, magazine covers, or stories about technology. Although this is starting to change, the change is not happening quickly enough. You can help. Spread the word and use this resource to inspire others to consider a career in robotics. As you will see there are many different ways the women we profile are making a difference.

We hope you are inspired by these profiles, and if you want to work in robotics too, please join us at Women in Robotics. We are now a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, but even so, this post wouldn’t be possible if not for the hard work of volunteers and the Women in Robotics Board of Directors.

Want to keep reading? There are more than 300 other stories on our 2013 to 2021 lists (and their updates):

Please share this and cite Women in Robotics as the author. Why not nominate a woman or non-binary person working in robotics for inclusion next year! Tweet this.

It’s time to update 19th century terms for 21st century technology

Women In Robotics — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 11:45:41 +0000

Unmanned and master/slave are two terms that are offensive to many in the community. Such terms may once have been accepted by society, but not any longer, and we are pleased to see many organizations starting to use alternative terms.

We call on you in 2022 to remove words with negative connotations, like the ones listed below, from all materials, course descriptions, department names, products, forms, reports or articles. The benefit to you is in broadening your appeal to all the community members who find those terms, if not outrightly offensive, then at the least old-fashioned and representative of a mindset that has not engaged meaningfully with creating inclusive or modern robotics.

Women in Robotics has taken the lead in curating a list of best practices in inclusive terminology, in consultation with other groups, and now we would like to share the first draft of “Terminology for 21st Century Technologists” for comment. So far we’ve considered gender, ethnicity and some disability issues. Our goal is to create a comprehensive directory of terminology, which can go through an update process periodically, just as standards do. There is obviously a little more work to be done and we want to include sections on ‘how to retire terms’, ‘how to implement changes constructively’ and more information about the process. This is where you can help us.

Please send comments in response to the first draft by June 28 2022 to reports@womeninrobotics.org

Interview with Andrea Thomaz (co-founder of Diligent Robotics): socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals

Women In Robotics — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 09:30:33 +0000

By Sonia Roberts, with additional editing by Dharini Dutia

Diligent Robotics, founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, develops socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals. Moxi, their flagship robot, delivers items like medications and wound dressings between departments to save the clinical staff’s time. Diligent has just closed their Series B funding round with $30 million.

We sat down with Dr. Thomaz to talk about Moxi, how to manage people’s expectations about robots, and advice for young people and women in robotics. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Andrea Thomaz with Diligent’s flagship robot Moxi.

What kinds of problems are you trying to solve with Moxi?

We are building Moxi to help hospitals with the massive workforce shortage that they’re seeing now more than ever. We actually started the company with the same intention several years ago before there was a worldwide pandemic, and it really has just gotten to be an even bigger problem for hospitals. I feel really strongly that robots have a place to play in teamwork environments, and hospitals are a great example of that. There’s no one person’s job in a hospital that you would actually want to give over to automation or robots, but there are tiny little bits of a lot of people’s jobs that are absolutely able to be automated and that we can give over to delivery robots in particular like Moxi. [The main problem we’re trying to solve with Moxi is] point to point delivery, where we’re fetching and gathering things and taking them from one area of the hospital to another.

Hospitals have a lot of stuff that’s moving around every day. Every person in the hospital is going to have certain medications that need to be delivered to them, certain lab samples that need to be taken and delivered to the central lab, certain supplies that need to come up to them, food and nutrition every day. You have a lot of stuff that’s coming and going between patient units and all these different support departments.

Every one of these support departments has a process in place for getting the stuff moved around, but no matter what, there’s stuff that happens every single day that requires ad-hoc [deliveries] to happen between all of these departments and different nursing units. So sometimes that’s going to be a nurse that just needs to get something for their patient and they want that to happen as soon as possible. They’re trying to discharge their patient, they need a particular wound dressing kit, they’re going to run down and get it because they want to help their patient get out. Or if there’s something that needs to be hand carried because the regular rounding of medications has already happened, a lot of times you’ll have a pharmacy technician stop what they’re doing and go and run some infusion meds for a cancer patient, for example. It sort of falls between these departments. There’s different people that would be involved but a lot of times it does fall on the nursing units themselves. A nurse explained to us one time that nurses are the last line of defense in patient care.

Moxi performing a delivery for a clinical staff member.

What is changing with this most recent round of funding?

Over the last 6-12 months, the demand has really skyrocketed such that we’re barely keeping up with the demand for people wanting to implement robots in their hospitals. That’s the reason why we’re raising this round of funding, expanding the team, and expanding our ability to capitalize on that demand. A couple of years ago, if we were working with a hospital it was because they had some special funds set aside for innovation or they had a CTO or a CIO that had a background in robotics, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that every hospital CIO was thinking about. Now that has completely changed. We’re getting cold outreach on our website from CIOs of hospitals saying “I need to develop a robotic strategy for our hospital and I want to learn about your solution.” Through the pandemic, I think everyone has seen that the workforce shortage in hospitals is only getting worse in the near term. Everybody wants to plan for the future and do everything they can to take small tasks off of the plates of their clinical teams. It’s been really exciting to be part of that market change and see that shift to where everybody is really really open to automation. Before we had to say “No no no, this is not the future, I promise it’s not scifi, I promise these really work.” Now [the climate has] really shifted to people understanding “This is actually something that can impact my teams.”

[Two of our investors are hospitals, and] that’s been one of our most exciting parts of this round. It’s always great to have a successful funding round, but to have strategic partners like Cedars-Sinai and Shannon Healthcare coming in and saying “Yeah, we actually want to build this alongside you” — it’s pretty exciting to have customers like that.

What kinds of technical problems did you run into when you were either building Moxi or deploying it in a hospital environment? How did you solve those problems?

One that was almost surprising in how often it came up, and really impacted our ability [to run Moxi in the hospital environment] because we have a software-based robotic solution that is connecting at a regular basis to cloud services, [was that] we had no clue how terrible hospital WiFi was going to be. We actually spent quite a while building in backup systems to be able to use WiFi, backup to LTE if we have to, but be smart about that so we’re not spending a whole bunch of money on LTE data. That was a problem that seemed very specific to hospitals in particular.

Another one was security and compliance. We just didn’t know what some of the different requirements were for hospitals until we actually got into the environments and started interacting with customers and understanding what they wanted to use Moxi for. When we were first doing research trials in 2018 or 2019, we had a version of the robot that was a little bit different than the one we have today. It had lots of open containers so you could just put whatever you wanted to on the robot and send it over to another location. We quickly learned that that limited what the robot was allowed to carry, because so much of what [the customers] wanted was to understand who pulled something out of the robot. So now we have an RF badge reader on the robot that is connected to locking storage containers that are only going to open if you’re the kind of person that is allowed to open the robot. That was an interesting technical challenge that we didn’t know about until after we got out there.

Moxi’s locking storage containers.

How did you work with nurses and the other healthcare professionals you were working with to figure out what would be the most helpful robot for them?

My background, and my co-founder Vivian Chu’s background, is in human-robot interaction so we knew that we didn’t know enough about nursing or the hospital environment. We spent the first 9 months of the company in 2018 building out our research prototype. It looked a lot like what Moxi looks like today. Under the hood it was completely different than what we have today in terms of the reliability and robustness of the hardware and software, but it was enough to get that platform out and have it deployed with nursing units. We embedded ourselves with four different nursing units across Texas over a year-long period. We would spend about 6-8 weeks with a nursing department, and we were just there — engineers, product people, and everybody in the company was cycling in and out a week or two at a time.

We would ask those nurses: “What would you actually want a robot like this to do?” Part of this that was really important was they didn’t have good ideas about what they would want the robot to do until they saw the robot. It was a very participatory design, where they had to see and get a sense for the robot before they would have good ideas of what they would want the robot to do. Then we would take those ideas [to the company] and come back and say “Yes we can do that,” or “No we can’t do that.” We came out of that whole process with a really great idea. We like to say that’s where we found our product market fit — that’s where we really understood that what was going to be most valuable for the robot to do was connecting the nursing units to these other departments. We can help a nurse with supply management and getting things from place to place within their department, or we can help them with things that are coming from really far away. [The second one] was actually impacting their time way way more.

Because the capabilities of robotic systems are usually misinterpreted, it can be really hard to manage the relationship with stakeholders and customers and set appropriate expectations. How did you manage that relationship?

We do a lot of demonstrations, but still with almost every single implementation you get questions about some robot in Hollywood, [and you have to say] “No, that’s the movies” and explain exactly what Moxi does.

From a design perspective, we also limit the English phrases that come out of Moxi’s mouth just because we don’t want to communicate a really high level of intelligence. There are lots of canned phrases and interactions on the iPad instead of via voice, and a lot of times the robot will just make meeps and beeps and flash lights and things like that.

Before starting the company, I had a lab, and one of the big research topics that we had for a number of years was embodied dialogue — how robots could have a real conversation with people. I had a very good appreciation for how hard that problem is, and also for just how much people want it. People come up to a robot, and they want it to be able to talk to them. How you can [set expectations] with the design and behavior of the robot has been a focus of mine since before we started the company. We purposefully don’t make the robot look very human-like because we don’t want there to be android human-level expectations, but [the robot does have a face and eyes so it can] communicate “I’m looking at that thing” and “I’m about to manipulate that thing,” which we think is important. It’s really about striking that balance.

What would you say is one lesson that you’ve learned from your work at Diligent so far and how are you looking to apply this lesson moving forward?

The difference between research and practice. On the one hand, the motivation and reason for starting a company is that you want to see the kinds of things that you’ve done in the research lab really make it out into the world and start to impact real people and their work. That’s been one of the most fascinating, impactful, and inspiring things about starting Diligent: Being able to go and see nurses when Moxi is doing work for them. They are so thankful! If you just hang back and watch Moxi come and do a delivery, almost always people are super excited to see the robot. They get their delivery and they’re like, “Oh, thank you Moxi!” That feels like we’re really making a difference in a way that you just don’t get with just research contributions that don’t make it all the way out into the world.

That being said though, there is a long tail of things that you have to solve from an engineering perspective beyond [developing a feature]. My VP of engineering Starr Corbin has this great way of putting it: The research team will get a certain thing on the product to be feature complete, where we’ve demonstrated that this feature works and it’s a good solution, but then there’s this whole phase that has to happen after that to get the feature to be production ready. I would say my biggest lesson is probably everything that it takes, and the entire team of people it takes, to get something from being feature complete to production ready. I have a deep appreciation for that. How fast we can move things out into the world is really dictated by some of that.

Andrea Thomaz (left) and Vivian Chu with Moxi.

What advice would you give young women in robotics?

If I put my professor hat on, I always had advice that I liked to give women in robotics, in academia, and just kind of pursuing things in general. Imposter syndrome is real, and everybody feels it. All you can do to combat it is not underestimate yourself. Speak up and know that you deserve a seat at the table. It’s all about hard work, but also making sure that your voice is heard. Some of the mentorship that I gave to a lot of my women grad students when I was a professor was around speaking engagements, speaking styles, and communication. It can be really uncomfortable when you’re the only anything in the room to stand up and feel like you deserve to be the one speaking, and so the more that you practice doing that, the more comfortable it can feel, the more confident you’ll feel in yourself and your voice. I think finding that confident voice is a really important skill that you have to develop early on in your career.

What’s one piece of advice you’ve received that you always turn to when things are tough?

There are two mentors that I’ve had who are women in AI and robotics. [In my] first year as a faculty member [the first mentor] came and gave a research seminar talk. I for some reason got to take her out to lunch by myself, so we had this amazing one-on-one. We talked a little bit about her talk, probably half of the lunch we talked about technical things, and then she just kind of turned the conversation [around] and said “Andrea, don’t forget to have a family.” Like, don’t forget to focus on that part of your life — it’s the most important thing. She got on a soapbox and said “You have to have a work life balance it’s so important. Don’t forget to focus on building a family for yourself, whatever that looks like.” That really stuck with me, especially as [when you’re] early in your career you’re worried about nothing but success. It was really powerful to have somebody strong and influential like that telling you “No, no, this is important and you need to focus on this.”

The other person that’s always been an inspiration and mentor for me that I’ll highlight [was the professor teaching a class I TA’d for at MIT]. I had found a bug in one of her homework problems, and she was like, “Oh, fascinating.” She was so excited that I had found a question that she didn’t know the answer to. She [just said], “Oh my gosh I don’t know, let’s go find out!” I remember her being this great professor at MIT, and she was excited to find something that she didn’t know and go and learn about it together as opposed to being embarrassed that she didn’t know something. I learned a lot from that interaction: That it’s fun to not know something because then you get to go and find the answer, and no matter who you are, you’re never expected to know everything.

Careers in robotics: Should you get a PhD or go into industry?

Women In Robotics — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 09:50:07 +0000

So you are considering a PhD in robotics! Before you decide to apply, here are some things to consider.

What is a PhD?

A PhD is a terminal degree, meaning it is the highest degree that you can earn. Almost without exception, people only earn one PhD. This degree is required for some jobs, mostly in academia, but is often just considered equivalent to years worked in industry. For some positions, hiring managers may even prefer to hire people without PhDs. A PhD is a paid (though not well paid) position at a university that lasts for between 4 and 10 years. To learn more about the PhD process, check out this previous post.

The author on a field trip to Oceano Dunes in California. She is controlling RHex, a six-legged robot, outfitted with sensors to study dune migration.

The day-to-day life of a PhD student versus an industry professional

The process of earning the PhD is very different from the process of earning a bachelor’s or a master’s degree. It is more like an internship or a job. The first two or so years of any PhD program will be largely coursework, but even at this stage you will be balancing spending time on your courses against spending time on research – either because you are rotating through different labs, because you are performing research for a qualifier, or because your advisor is attaching you to an existing research project to give you some experience and mentorship before you develop your own project. This means that getting a PhD is not actually a way to avoid “getting a job” or to “stay in school” – it is actually a job. This also means that just because you are good at or enjoy coursework does not mean you will necessarily enjoy or excel in a PhD program, and just because you struggled with coursework does not mean you will not flourish in a PhD program. After you are done with coursework, you will spend all of your time on research. Depending on the day, that can mean reading textbooks and research papers, writing papers, making and giving presentations, teaching yourself new skills or concepts, programming or building robots, running experiments, and mentoring younger students. If you excelled at either conducting research as an undergraduate or very open-ended course projects much more than typical coursework, you’ll be much more likely to enjoy research as a PhD student.

Types of goal setting in academia and industry

In course work, and in industry jobs with a good manager, you are given relatively small, well defined goals to accomplish. You have a team (your study group, your coworkers) who are all working towards the same goal and who you can ask for help. In a PhD program, you are largely responsible for narrowing down a big research question (like “How can we improve the performance of a self-driving car?”) into a question that you can answer over the course of a few years’ diligent work (“Can we use depth information to develop a new classification method for pedestrians?”). You define your own goals, often but not always with the advice of your advisor and your committee. Some projects might be team projects, but your PhD only has your name on it: You alone are responsible for this work. If this sounds exciting to you, great! But these are not good working conditions for everybody. If you do not work well under those conditions, know that you are no less brilliant, capable, or competent than someone who does. It just means that you might find a job in industry significantly more fulfilling than a job in academia. We tend to assume that getting a PhD is a mark of intelligence and perseverance, but that is often not the case — sometimes academia is just a bad match to someone’s goals and motivations.

Meaning and impact

Academic research usually has a large potential impact, but little immediate impact. In contrast, industry jobs generally have an impact that you can immediately see, even if it is very small. It is worth considering how much having a visible impact matters to you and your motivation because this is a major source of PhD student burnout. To give a tangible example, let’s say that you choose to do research on bipedal robot locomotion. In the future, your work might contribute to prostheses that can help people who have lost legs walk again, or to humanoid robots that can help with elder care. Is it important to you that you can see these applications come to fruition? If so, you might be more fulfilled working at a company that builds robots directed towards those kinds of tasks instead of working on fundamental research that may never see application in the real world. The world will be better for your contributions regardless of where you make them – you just want to make sure you are going to make those impacts in a way that allows you to find them meaningful!

Pay and lifetime earning potential

Engineers are significantly better paid in industry than academia. Since working in industry for a minimum of five to ten years and getting a PhD are often considered equivalent experience for the purposes of many job applications, even the time spent getting a PhD – where you will earn much less than you would in industry – can mean that you give up a substantial amount of money. Let’s say that an entry-level engineering job makes $100,000 per year, and a graduate student earns $40,000. If your PhD takes 6 years, you lose out on $60,000 x 6 = $360,000 of potential pay. Consider also that a PhD student’s stipend is fairly static, whereas you can expect to have incremental salary increases, bonuses, and promotions in an industry job, meaning that you actually lose out on at least $400,000. This is a totally valid reason to either skip the PhD process completely, or to work in industry for a few years and build up some savings before applying to PhD programs.

Robotics Institute at University of Toronto

How do I know what I want?

It’s hard! If you’re still uncertain, remember that you can gain a few years of work experience in industry before going back to get the PhD, and will likely be considered an even stronger candidate than before. Doing this allows you to build up some savings and become more confident that you really do want to get that PhD.

Thinking through these questions might help you figure out what direction you want to go:

Are you much more motivated to do class projects that you are allowed to fully design yourself?
When you think about something small you built being used daily by a neighbor, how do you feel?
Is your desire to get a PhD because of the prestige associated with the degree, or the specific job opportunities it opens up?

Careers in robotics: What is a robotics PhD?

Women In Robotics — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 10:12:20 +0000

This relatively general post focuses on robotics-related PhD programs in the American educational system. Much of this will not apply to universities in other countries, or to other departments in American universities. This post will take you through the overall life cycle of a PhD and is intended as a basic overview for anyone unfamiliar with the process, whether they are considering a PhD or have a loved one who is currently in a PhD program and just want to learn more about what they are doing.

The basics

A PhD (doctoral degree) in engineering or a DEng (Doctorate of Engineering) is the highest degree that you can earn in engineering. This is generally a degree that people only earn one of, if they earn one at all. Unlike a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree, a PhD studying a topic relevant to robotics should be free and students should receive a modest stipend for their living expenses. There are very few stand-alone robotics PhDs programs, so people generally join robotics labs through PhD programs in electrical engineering, computer science, or mechanical engineering.

Joining a lab

In some programs, students are matched with a lab when they are accepted to the university. This matching is not random: If a university works this way, a professor has to have a space in their lab, see the application, and decide that the student would be a good fit for their lab. Essentially, the professor “hires” the student to join their lab.

Other programs accept cohorts of students who take courses in the first few years and pick professors to work with by some deadline in the program. The mechanism through which students and professors pair up is usually rotations: Students perform a small research project in each of several labs and then join one of the labs they rotated in.

The advisor

Regardless of how a student gets matched up with their advisor, the advisor has a lot of power to make their graduate school experience a positive one or a negative one. Someone who is a great advisor for one student may not be a great advisor for another. If you are choosing an advisor, it pays to pay attention to the culture in a lab, and whether you personally feel supported by that environment and the type of mentorship that your advisor offers. In almost every case, this is more important for your success in the PhD program than the specifics of the project you will work on or the prestige of the project, collaborators, or lab.

Qualifiers

PhD programs typically have qualifiers at some point in the first three years. Some programs use a test-based qualifier system, either creating a specific qualifier test or using tests from final exams of required courses. In some programs, you are tested by a panel of faculty who ask the student questions about course material that they are expected to have learned by this point. In other programs, the student performs a research project and then presents it to a panel of faculty.

Some universities view the qualifiers as a hurdle that almost all of the admitted PhD students should be able to pass, and some universities view them as a method to weed out students from the PhD program. If you are considering applying to PhD programs, it is worth paying attention to this cultural difference between programs, and not taking it too personally if you do not pass the qualifiers at a school that weeds out half of their students. After all, you were qualified enough to be accepted. It is also important to remember, if you join either kind of program, that if you do not pass your qualifiers, usually what happens is that you leave the program with a free master’s degree. Your time in the program will not be wasted!

The author testing a robot on a steep dune face on a research field trip at Oceano Dunes.

Research

Some advisors will start students on a research project as soon as they join the lab, typically by attaching them to an existing project so that they can get a little mentorship before starting their own project. Some advisors will wait until the student is finished with qualifiers. Either way, it is worth knowing that a PhD student’s relationship to their PhD project is likely different from any project they have ever been involved with before.

For any other research project, there is another person – the advisor, an older graduate student, a post doc – who has designed the project or at least worked with the student to come up with parameters for success. The scope of previous research projects would typically be one semester or one summer, resulting in one or two papers at most. In contrast, a PhD student’s research project is expected to span multiple years (at least three), should result in multiple publications, and is designed primarily by the student. It is not just that the student has ownership over their project, but that they are responsible for it in a way that they have never been responsible for such a large open-ended project before. It is also their primary responsibility – not one project alongside many others. This can be overwhelming for a lot of students, which is why it is impolite to ask a PhD student how much longer they expect their PhD to take.

The committee

The “committee” is a group of professors that work in a related area to the student’s. Their advisor is on the committee, but it must include other professors as well. Typically, students need to have a mix of professors from their school and at least one other institution. These professors provide ongoing mentorship on the thesis project. They are the primary audience for the thesis proposal and defense, and will ultimately decide what is sufficient for the student to do in order to graduate. If you are a student choosing your committee, keep in mind that you will benefit greatly from having supportive professors on your committee, just like you will benefit from having a supportive advisor.

Proposing and defending the thesis

When students are expected to propose a thesis project varies widely by program. In some programs, students propose a topic as part of their qualifier process. In others, students have years after finishing their qualifiers to propose a topic – and can propose as little as a semester before they defend!

The proposal and defense both typically take the form of a presentation followed by questions from the committee and the audience. In the proposal, the student outlines the project they plan to do, and presents criteria that they and their committee should agree on as the required minimum for them to do in order to graduate. The defense makes the case that the student has hit those requirements.

After the student presents, the committee will ask them some questions, will confer, and then will either tell the student that they passed or failed. It is very uncommon for a PhD student to fail their defense, and it is generally considered a failure on the part of the advisor rather than the student if this happens, because the advisor shouldn’t have let the student present an unfinished thesis. After the defense, there may be some corrections to the written thesis document or even a few extra experiments, but typically the student does not need to present their thesis again in order to graduate.

The bottom line

A PhD is a long training process to teach students how to become independent researchers. Students will take classes and perform research, and will also likely teach or develop coursework. If this is something you’re thinking about, it’s important to learn about what you might be getting yourself into – and if it’s a journey one of your loved ones is starting on, you should know that it’s not just more school!

What Women in Robotics achieved in 2021 and what’s coming next in 2022

Women In Robotics — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 15:17:20 +0000

It’s been a hard year for women all over the world, and I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to Women in Robotics in 2021, whether you’ve simply shared information about yourself in our community #intros channel, or organized an online event, or made yourself available as an advisor in our pilot mentoring program. Perhaps you’ve been furthering our mission in an ‘unofficial’ way simply by supporting other women, and non-binary people, who are working in robotics, or who are interested in working in robotics.

We recognize and appreciate the community building work that women do, which is so often out of the spotlight, and on top of everything else. Women’s work has rarely been given economic value as one of my heroes Marilyn Waring wrote in “Counting for Nothing”. She founded feminist economics, now called triple bottom line accounting, and changed the way that the World Bank and other global organizations evaluate economies.

The pandemic has forced women out of the workforce at twice the rate of men, leaving women’s participation in the workforce lower than it’s been for 30 years. And the pressure shows no sign of stopping. However, I believe that whenever women are forced to step backwards, we move forward again with renewed determination and focus. And so my inspiration is renewed to further the mission of Women in Robotics, to support women and non-binary people who work in robotics, and those who would like to work in robotics. We may all find it hard to find time, but small actions in the right time and place can move mountains.

In 2021, our annual showcase featured not 25 or 30 but ‘50 women in robotics you need to know about’ from 21 different countries, from industry, startups and academia, with particular mention of the women featured who have fought for the rights of refugees and persecuted women, especially the Afghanistan Women’s Robotics Team. For other women, this recognition has helped to raise their profile within universities or companies, leading to increased opportunities.

Our annual list also means that there’s no excuse for not including women in conferences, articles, policy making, job searches etc. In 2022, I’d love to see us create wikipedia pages for more women in robotics, and create a speaker database, and a citation list, similar to what Black in Robotics has done, and the work of 500 Women Scientists.

The work of women in science is still less likely to be cited than that of men. Recent UNESCO research has found that citation bias is the start of career long lack of recognition for women, starting with women citing themselves less often than men do. In 2022, let’s focus on improving citation rates, increasing the number of women in panels, journals and conferences, or holding organizers accountable. We can target increasing the number of women cited in robotics curricula, reading lists and coursework. As an organization we can reach out to universities, labs, conferences and journals in a way that individual women can not.

Another grassroots campaign that we started was the Women in Robotics Photo Challenge, which has already resulted in some great new photos of women building robots joining the image search results. Since then we’ve realized that ordinary google or wikipedia search steer you to Sophia or sex robots, rather than referencing real women building robots. It’s also time to retire the word ‘unmanned’. Women in Robotics is planning to request that any university still referencing ‘Unmanned’ Vehicles should substitute with driverless, uncrewed or a better term.

The lack of in person conferences is severely impacting the benefits of in person networking at a senior level for women in robotics, and so we’d like to finally launch our Advisory Board through an online networking event(s) for senior women in robotics, both in academia and industry..

We piloted our first mentoring program over 12 weeks with 16 women and it was a very successful experience for almost every participant. We know that there is a lot of demand to run the program again but we’ll need more volunteers to help organize the events and match mentors/mentees. This is one area in which sponsorship for Women in Robotics could be useful, but sponsorship comes with a significant administrative cost, so we will only seek sustainable major sponsorships in 2022.

My gratitude goes to CITRIS & the Banatao Institute, through the People and Robots Lab, for providing me with some funding for the last two years that has allowed me to spend some of my time on Women in Robotics, Black in Robotics and the Society, Robots and Us Seminars.

My call to action is for you to make your volunteer labor impactful by investing your time in a call to action with a big outcome. I hope it’s one of our Women in Robotics actions, but in everything you do you represent women in robotics and allies. Best wishes to you all for 2022. And thank you to the 2021 Women in Robotics Board of Directors! Our full Annual Report is here.

Counting for Nothing (originally If Women Counted) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Women_Counted by Marilyn Waring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Waring
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/19/great-resignation-mothers-forced-to-leave-jobs
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/women-and-middle-managers-will-lead-the-great-resignation-into-2022/
https://en.unesco.org/news/unesco-research-shows-women-career-scientists-still-face-gender-bias

Reflections from the Women in Robotics Board of Directors:

We are very grateful for the work of our Board Members over the last year and we thank Kerri Fetzer-Borelli, Hallie Siegel and Ariel Anders for their vision and experience on the 2020 and 2021 Board. We are delighted to have them join our Advisory Board in 2022.

Allison Thackston:

Women in Robotics community and support in 2021 was different from previous years when we relied a lot on local chapters, meetups, and networking. With many offices locked down and people more hesitant to do events in person, we’ve struggled a bit. On the bright side, we’ve been bringing up our online presence, improving our website, and increasing our social media outreach. In the year ahead, I hope we continue this growth.

Cynthia Yeung:

Launching the Project Advance mentorship program was a highlight of my service on the WiR board in 2021. We have received lots of great feedback from the inaugural cohort which we can use to improve the programming for the second cohort in 2022. One of the key success metrics was the percentage of returning mentors (demand is unlimited in two-sided marketplaces; supply is the constraint) and we are pleased to report that all mentors are interested in returning for the second cohort. It is personally gratifying to be in a position to implement the kind of program that I wanted to have access to earlier in my career. On a macro level, I believe that strong focus and measurable progress on a small number of initiatives will bode well for WiR’s impact roadmap.

Lisa Winter:

2021 was a year of self-reflection and a test of patience. I think 2022 will be the year when a lot of us take bigger risks as we try to figure out a better work/life balance. I would like to see more communication on the WiR Slack, specifically giving job advice and engineering advice. What I enjoy about other sites that I think we could incorporate is more sharing of personal projects; connecting over them and also learning.

Laura Stelzner:

WiR provides community and support in a field where it can be lonely being one of the few women at your company/department. As the field of robotics grows we would like to show women and non-binary people all the amazing career opportunities that exist, by providing them with mentorship, networking, leadership and career advancement opportunities.

Laurie Linz:

2021 was a quiet year for Boulder/Denver, we didn’t hold any local (in person) meetings. I do have good news and that is I am in process with setting up some in person events again. We’ll approach with caution given the covid situation, but happy to be starting again.

WiR helps women level up or launch their career in robotics. We welcome those not ready to launch with networking and educational support. Learn, launch, level up.

Sue Keay:

One of the concerns that keeps me awake at night is wondering what important challenges we might have solved already and what technologies are missing because of the lack of diversity in robotics. That’s why Women in Robotics exists, to help to support the small number of women who are contributing to developing robotic technologies and to encourage more to join our ranks. The global list of women in robotics has been an important way to signal the important contributions that women are making in this space and to raise the profile of robotics as a valid career choice for women. Joining WiR is acknowledging that we can be doing better with diversity in robotics and may provide much needed support to a woman in robotics who may be questioning their reason for remaining in such a male-dominated field. My own experience has been that women have always been my greatest supporters and I feel less alone by being part of WiR.

Sue Keay (Robotics Australia) with Erin McColl (Toyota Research Institute) with a Ghost Robotics platform.

50 women in robotics you need to know about 2021

Women In Robotics — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 07:00:53 +0000

It’s Ada Lovelace Day and once again we’re delighted to introduce you to “50 women in robotics you need to know about”! From the Afghanistan Girls Robotics Team to K.G.Engelhardt who in 1989 founded, and was the first Director of, the Center for Human Service Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, these women showcase a wide range of roles in robotics. We hope these short bios will provide a world of inspiration, in our ninth Women in Robotics list! Tweet this.

In 2021, we showcase women in robotics in Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, United Kingdom and United States. They are researchers, industry leaders, and artists. Some women are at the start of their careers, while others have literally written the book, the program or the standards.

It is, however, disturbing how hard it can be to find records of women who were an important part of the history of robotics, such as K.G. Engelhardt. Statistically speaking, women are far more likely to leave the workforce or change careers due to family pressures, and that contributes to the erasure. Last year, we talked about the importance of having more equitable citation counts. The citation problem is expected to significantly disadvantage women and people of color due to the historical lack of women followed by the recent growth of large scientific teams, multiplying exclusion.

A more dangerous form of erasure is happening today in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Girls Robotics Team was forced to flee the country, thanks to help from their support group, the Digital Citizen Fund. What steps must the international community take in support of a future for Afghan girls’ education? Hear from UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, Nobel Laureate and Malala Fund Co-Founder Malala Yousafzai, and Somaya Faruqi, Captain of the Afghan Dreamers Robotics Team, in this recent UN video.

You can support The Afghan Dreamers here, and soon watch a documentary about the original team which was shot with the girls in Afghanistan in 2019 and 2020.

Meanwhile, UC Davis developed an online digital backpack to keep academic credentials and school records safe and private. The Article 26 Backpack references the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the right to an education. At the moment, the Backpack is for people 18 and over, with a high school diploma or baccalaureate, whose education has been affected by war, conflict or economic conditions.

On the good news front, the IEEE RAS Women in Engineering (WIE) Committee recently completed a several year study of gender representation in conference leading roles at RAS-supported conferences. Individuals who hold these roles select organizing committees, choose speakers, and make final decisions on paper acceptances. In this video, the authors lead a discussion about the findings and the story behind the study. In addition to presenting detailed data and releasing anonymized datasets for further study, the authors provided suggestions on changes to help ensure a more diverse and representative robotics community where anyone can thrive. The paper “Gender Diversity of Conference Leadership” by Laura Graesser, Aleksandra Faust, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Lydia Tapia, and Risa Ulinskiby was in the June 2021 IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, with a follow up “Retrospective on a Watershed Moment for IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Gender Diversity [Women in Engineering]” in Sep 2021 by Lydia Tapia reporting on gender diversity initiatives undertaken by the Robotics and Automation Society.

We publish this list because the lack of visibility of women in robotics leads to the unconscious perception that women aren’t making newsworthy contributions. We encourage you to use our lists to help find women for keynotes, panels, interviews and to cite their research and include them in curricula. Tulane University published a guide to help you calculate how much of your reading list includes female authors and a citation guide, similar to the CiteHer campaign from BlackComputeher.org.

And Women in Robotics have just launched a Photo Challenge! We got so tired of seeing literally hundreds of images of female robots showing up whenever we searched for images of women building robots, or images of men building robots while women watched. Let’s push Sophia out of the top search results and showcase real women building real robots instead!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org Want to keep reading? There are more than 200 other stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists (and their updates):

Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year! Tweet this.

Join the Women in Robotics Photo Challenge

Women In Robotics — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 05:54:48 +0000

How can women feel as if they belong in robotics if we can’t see any pictures of women building or programming robots? The Civil Rights Activist Marian Wright Edelson aptly said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” We’d like you all to take photos of women building and coding robots and share them with us!

Here’s the handy guide to what a great photo looks like with some awesome examples. This is a great opportunity for research labs and robotics companies to showcase their talented women and other underrepresented groups.

WiR IV with Johanna Austin, roboticist, helicopter pilot & techsupervixen

Women In Robotics — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 18:35:36 +0000

Watch Johanna Austin talk about her journey, make her own career path, and trailblazing a way in STEM!! Johanna Austin was the first female Robotics and Automation Research Engineer in Boeing’s Melbourne based robotics group. She was awarded her Bachelor of Engineering with First Class Honors at RMIT and her Masters of Science in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Her latest role is as Technical Lead Engineer – Robotics Systems at AOS Group with focus in autonomous systems and distributed AI. Johanna is also a part time helicopter pilot. She shares information about her career journey and her feelings at being the first woman in ten years in her research group, how she handled that and the importance of having women around you at work. Johanna also shows some of the advanced robotics research that she’s been engaged in with Boeing.

https://youtu.be/3Wd2tccDebs?t=250

You can also follow Johanna (or Hoj) on Instagram :) if you like flying and Matrix metaphors. Many thanks to Nicci Roussow and Poornima Nathan for organizing the Women in Robotics Melbourne chapter meetings. If you’d like to join one of our local chapters or start your own Women in Robotics chapter – please reach out to us!

Introducing Eliza Kosoy; E-liza Dolls

Women In Robotics — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 09:30:04 +0000

Eliza Kosoy is a Ph.D Student at UC Berkeley. She studied mathematics in college and then worked for Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum at MIT in his computational cognitive science lab. She then started on a Ph.D at UC Berkeley working with Professor Alison Gopnik in 2018. She is most proud of receiving funding and winning an innovation prize that catalyzed her business! Her startup is called E-liza Dolls. They are 18’’ electronic “liza” dolls that introduce young girls to coding and hardware in a fun way!

She chose this topic because as a woman in STEM she couldn’t help but feel the gender and racial divide and discrepancies in the hard sciences. With her background in child development, it only made sense that it’s best to expose children to these concepts early on so they will be embedded into their hypothesis space as they develop. The hardest challenge for her is “Soldering Errors” and when tiny components fall off without notice.

E-liza Dolls Kickstarter will open very soon in March 2021… We’ll update this post the moment it goes live!

Roboticists in Residence is a Silicon Valley Robotics initiative that provides free studio space and support for creative artists and engineers making a difference, whether it’s modding a Tesla with all the conveniences of the Victorian era or adding to the ROS2 navigational stack. For more information and updates from our Roboticists in Residence

Women in Robotics Update: Andra Keay, Nguyen Sao Mai and Selin Alara Örnek

Women In Robotics — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 02:49:34 +0000

Here’s a Women in Robotics Spotlight, where we share stories from women who are working on all sorts of interesting projects who haven’t yet been featured in our Annual Showcase. We hope these stories provide inspiration to everyone to join us working in the field of robotics. And if you’re a woman working in robotics, why not contribute your story too!

“I love robots however I do find it frustrating when the code that was working the day before doesn’t work. I also find it hard supplying my robots with power. I learn online although I do have a few mentors that help me but it’s really not easy learning on my own. My favourite thing about robotics is making them, and when they work like they should. My robots make people really happy so I love that. I also love succeeding – the feeling when my robots come to life is unbelievable.” says Selin Alara Örnek a high school student who has built five robots, including a robot guide dog for the blind.

Andra Keay Managing Director at Silicon Valley Robotics, Visiting Scholar at CITRIS People and Robots Lab and Founder at Women in Robotics

Why robots?

“My background is Human-Robot Interaction, Design, and Communications Technology – which seems a long way from robotics, but our mass communication technologies (including internet) were the most powerful and creative technologies of the 20th century.

I’ve always been interested in robots, firstly as a philosophical thing, then as interesting robots became possible, fascinated by the way in which this latest evolution of technology is spreading into society.

The sheer scope of the technology is my favorite thing, but historically, the incredible homogeneity or lack of diversity in robotics is my least favorite thing. Fortunately, we’re changing that!

We have technology that can solve the world’s greatest challenges, if we can continue to find ways to market and avoid frittering away our advances on novelty devices, games or advertising.”

What suggestions do you have for other Women in Robotics?

“Every time I was trusted to lead a project I grew a lot and gained confidence. Until then, I hadn’t even realized that I was lacking in confidence. At the time, it just seemed expected of young women to follow other people, not go my own way.

I’d like to call out people on being too self deprecating, putting themselves down, or apologizing for themselves. If I had a dollar for every time a women in robotics has said “but I’m not really a….” then I’d be able to fund a great robotics company! I also call on people to stop blaming women for not speaking up or ‘leaning in’ when no one in industry is listening to them!”

Nguyen Sao Mai Assistant Professor at ENSTA-Paris, IP-Paris and also affiliated at IMT Atlantique

Why robots?

Nguyen Sao Mai has enabled a robot to coach physical rehabilitation in the projects RoKInter and the experiment KERAAL she coordinated, funded by the European Union through FP-7 project ECHORD++. She has participated in project AMUSAAL, for analysing human activities of daily living through cameras, and CPER VITAAL for developing assistive technologies for the elderly and disabled. She has developed machine learning algorithms combining reinforcement learning and active imitation learning for interactive and multi-task learning, contributing to the start of interactive reinforcement learning. She is currently associate editor of the journal IEEE TCDS and co-chair of the Task force “Action and Perception” of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive and Developmental Systems.

“Cognitive Developmental Robotics is a wonderful field to allow us to build new assistive robots that can evolve in interaction with humans and adapt to the needs of its users by continual learning. It is also an amazing tool to understand and model biological cognition and learning processes.

Robotics is unleashing little by little its potential as a tool to address humankind’s challenges, such as the medical advances, environmental issues or social assistance for the elderly and the disabled. This year’s situation has for instance has shown the usefulness of robotics in medical environments and nursing homes.”

What suggestions do you have for other Women in Robotics?

“Robotics and artificial intelligence are wonderfully multidisciplinary fields. It can be surprising at first sight that social sciences play an essential role in the scientific advances. They need contributions from researchers of different fields. They could also greatly benefit from the women’s outlook on intelligence or the social role of robots in our future society. “

Selin Alara Örnek High School Student and Inventor

Why robots?

“I am a 14 year old high school student, I have been coding since I was 8 and building robots since I was 10 years old. I have built 5 robots till now one is a guide dog for blind people, ic4u and ic4u2, I have built 2 versions. I have another robot BB4All which is a school aid robot to help students, teachers and staff its main aim is to prevent bullying. I have also built an Android robot and a Starwars Droid DO as I love both of them.

When I was 9 we lost our family dog I was really upset as I don’t have any brothers or sisters and he was like my brother. I wanted to bring him back to life as I was little I dreamed of bringing one of my soft toys to life. Whilst on holiday with my family I saw a guide dog with its blind owner. I love dogs and was really happy to see a dog helping in such way. But then I remembered how sad I was and I thought if the blind person’s dog was to die they would not only lose their best friend but their eyes again too. So I decided to build my robot guide dog ic4u.

I am currently rebuilding BB4All as the first one I built was not very strong and made of cardboard now I am printing the pieces with a 3d printer and adding some more features. In my robots, I use image recognition, object detection, face recognition, voice commands, dialogflow, omnidirection movements, Google maps api and Google assistant integration and various sensors.

I believe that robots will be part of our everyday life and that we will need them more and more. I love robots so that makes me really happy. My dream is to build a humanoid in the future and send it to space so that it can do research on the black hole.”

What suggestions do you have for other Women in Robotics?

“I used to love playing games minecraft, etc then in English class my teacher started making games for us to play whilst learning and I really wanted to do so. I asked him how he did it and he told me to have a look at MIT Scratch and encouraged me to code my own games. He told me I could do it and that I should try. That is how I started to learn how to code and I am very happy to have a teacher like him.

A lot of girls are not very interested in coding robotics and find what I do very boring. I spend a lot of time taking my robots to events to talk about my robots and show how coding and robotics can be fun and also how technology can be used for good. I recently did a TEDx talk and have given presentations at plenty of local and international events. A lot of other kids get in touch with me to ask questions which I also like to answer. Especially little girls that get in touch as it makes me happy to see them so interested and excited. I also try to send messages to parents in my presentations and interviews, pointing out that they should respect their children’s choices and that they need to give equal opportunities to both their daughters and sons.”

We encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org We’re a global network with local chapters around the world. The guest speaker at our most recent event, Women in Robotics Melbourne Australia was Nicole Klouet, a PhD candidate in aerospace engineering working on reducing the acoustic impact of drones on society.

Women in Robotics Update: introducing our 2021 Board of Directors

Women In Robotics — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 02:22:24 +0000

Women in Robotics is a grassroots community involving women from across the globe. Our mission is supporting women working in robotics and women who would like to work in robotics. We formed an official 501c3 non-profit organization in 2020 headquartered in Oakland California. We’d like to introduce our 2021 Board of Directors:

Andra Keay, Women in Robotics President

Managing Director at Silicon Valley Robotics | Visiting Scholar at CITRIS People and Robots Lab | Startup Advisor & Investor

Andra Keay founded Women in Robotics originally under the umbrella of Silicon Valley Robotics, the non-profit industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra’s background is in human-robot interaction and communication theory. She is a trained futurist, founder of the Robot Launch global startup competition, Robot Garden maker space, Women in Robotics and is a mentor, investor and advisor to startups, investors, accelerators and think tanks, with a strong interest in commercializing socially positive robotics and AI. Andra speaks regularly at leading technology conferences, and is Secretary-General of the International Alliance of Robotics Associations. She is also a Visiting Scholar with the UC’s CITRIS People and Robots Research Group.

Allison Thackston

Roboticist, Software Engineer & Manager– Waymo

Allison Thackston is the Chair of Women in Robotics Website SubCommittee and CoChair of our New Chapter Formation SubCommittee. She is also a Founding Member of the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee. Prior to working at Waymo, she worked at Nuro and was the Manager of Shared Autonomy at Toyota Research Institute, and Principle Research Scientist Intelligent Manipulation. She has an MS in Robotics and MechEng from the University of Hawaii and a BS in EEng from Georgia Tech. With a passion for robots and robotic technologies, she brings energy, dedication, and smarts to all the challenges she faces.

Ariel Anders

Roboticist – Robust.AI

Ariel Anders is a black feminist roboticist who enjoys spending time with her family and artistic self-expression. Anders is the first roboticist hired at Robust.AI, an early stage robotics startup building the world’s first industrial grade cognitive engine. Anders received a BS in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz and her Doctorate in Computer Science from MIT, where she taught project-based collaborative robotics courses, developed an iOS app for people with vision impairment, and received a grant to install therapy lamps across campus. Her research focused on reliable robotic manipulation with the vision of enabling household helpers.

Cynthia Yeung

Robotics Executive & COO, Advisor, Speaker

Cynthia Yeung is the Chair of the Women in Robotics Mentoring Program SubCommittee, which will be piloting shortly. She is also a mentor and advisor to robotics companies, accelerators and venture capital firms, and speaks at leading technology conferences. Cynthia studied Entrepreneurship at Stanford, Systems Engineering at UPenn, and did a triple major at The Wharton School, UPenn, where she was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a Joseph Wharton Scholar. She has led Strategic or International Partnerships at organizations like Google, Capital One and led Product Partnerships at SoftBank Robotics, Checkmate.io and was COO of CafeX. In her own words, “I practice radical candor. I build teams to make myself obsolete. I create value to better human society. I edit robotics research papers for love.”

Hallie Siegel

Associate Director, Strategy & Operations at University of Toronto

Hallie Siegel is the driving force behind the emerging robotics network in Canada, centered at the University of Toronto. She is a communications professional serving the technology, innovation and research sectors, specifically robotics, automation and AI. She is pursuing a Masters in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCADU, where she was Dean’s Scholar. Hallie was also the first Managing Editor at Robohub.org, the site for robotics news and views, after doing science communications for Raffaelo D’Andrea’s lab at ETH Zurich. In her spare time, she is a multidisciplinary artist, and Chair of the Women in Robotics Vision Workshops.

Kerri Fetzer-Borelli

Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Community Engagement at Toyota Research Institute

Kerri Fetzer-Borelli is the CoChair for the Women in Robotics New Chapter Formation SubCommittee. They have worked as Scientific Data Collector for the military, as a Welder in nuclear power plants, and as the Manager of Autonomous Vehicle Testing, then Prototyping and Robotics Operations at Toyota Research Institute where they now lead DEI and Community Engagement. Kerri mobilizes cross functional teams to solve complex, abstract problems by distilling strategic, actionable items and workflows from big ideas.

Laura Stelzner

Robotics Software Engineer at RIOS

Laura Stelzner is the Chair of the Women in Robotics Community Management SubCommittee increasing activity and engagement in our online community. By day, she is in charge of software for emerging robotics startup RIOS which provides factory automation as a service, deploying AI powered and dexterous robots on factory assembly lines. Prior to RIOS, Laura worked at Toyota Research Institute, Space Systems Loral, Amazon Labs, Electric Movement and Raytheon. She has a BS in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.

Laurie Linz, Women in Robotics Treasurer

Software Development Engineer in Test at Alteryx

Laurie Linz is the Women in Robotics Treasurer, as well as founder of the Boulder/Denver Colorado WiR Chapter. When not working as a software developer or QA tester, Laurie can be found with her hands on an Arduino, or a drone, or a camera. As she says, “I like to build things, break things and solve puzzles all day! Thankfully development and testing allows me to do that. Fred Brooks was right when he wrote that the programmer gains the “sheer joy of making things” and he talks of “castles in the air, from air” as we are only limited by the bounds of human imagination.”

Lisa Winter

Head of Hardware at Quartz

A roboticist since childhood, Lisa has over 20 years experience designing and building robots. She has competed in Robot Wars and BattleBots competitions since 1996, and is a current judge on BattleBots. She currently holds the position of Head of Hardware at Quartz, an early stage startup working on the future of construction. Her rugged hardware can be seen attached to tower cranes all around California. In her free time she likes to volunteer her prototyping skills to the Marine Mammal Center to aid in the rehab of hundreds of animals each year. She is a Founding Board Member of Women in Robotics and Chair of the Artwork/Swag SubCommittee.

Sue Keay, Women in Robotics Secretary

CEO at Queensland AI Hub and Chair of the Board of Directors of Robotics Australia Group

Currently CEO of Queensland AI Hub, after leading cyber-physical systems research for CSIRO’s Data61. Previously Sue set-up the world’s first robotic vision research centre. She led the development of Australia’s first robotics roadmap, the Robotics Australia Network and the Queensland Robotics Cluster. A Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, she founded and Chairs the Board of Robotics Australia Group. Sue also serves on the Boards of CRC ORE, Queensland AI Hub and represents Australia in the International Alliance of Robotics Associations.

With such a go-getting Board of Directors, you can be assured that Women in Robotics is preparing for an active 2021. As of 1/1/21, we had 1270 members in our online community, 900 additional newsletter subscribers, and six active chapters in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia. All Women in Robotics events abide by our Code of Conduct and we offer it for use at any robotics event or conference.

Our focus for 2021 is on:

Project Inspire – our annual 30 women in robotics you need to know about list, plus regular updates, spotlights, and wikipedia pages for women in robotics.
Project Connect – forming new chapters, promoting our online community, and enjoying regular member led activities and events, under a Code of Conduct.
Project Advance – piloting a mentoring program, providing educational resources for women in robotics, and improving accountability metrics in our workplaces.

We’d also like to thank our two Founding Board Members, Sabine Hauert of the Hauert Lab at University of Bristol UK and Founder of Robohub.org and Sarah Osentoski SVP of Engineering at Iron Ox, who are leaving the WiR Board but who will be leading our new Women in Robotics Advisory Board, another new initiative for 2021.

You can subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on our activities, to sign up for our speaker database or volunteering opportunities, or to show your support as an ally. Please support our activities with a one off or recurring donation (tax deductible in the USA).

Women in Robotics Update: Melonee Wise, Maren Bennewitz, Alicia Casals

Women In Robotics — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:23:44 +0000

Introducing the seventh post in our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Melonee Wise, Maren Bennewitz and Alicia Casals and from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2014. These women have pioneered foundational research in robotics, created organizations of impact, and inspired the next generations of robotics researchers, of all ages.

Melonee Wise

CEO of Fetch Robotics

Melonee Wise(featured in 2014), now a CEO of Fetch Robotics has been designing, building, and programming robotic hardware for an autonomous boat, autonomous car, personal robot platforms, battlebots, and several low cost platforms since 19 years. At Fetch Robotics, she and her team provide the best AMR or Autonomous Mobile Robot solutions for the logistics industry through a fleet of products that provide ‘On Demand Autonomy’.

Fetch Robotics was also the first winner of Overall Excellence Award in the Silicon Valley Robotics ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards in 2020. Wise was recognized by Silicon Valley Business Journal as 40 under 40 and by Technology Review TR35 as a ’40 female founders who crushed it’ in 2016. She also received the Women of Influence in 2017 Silicon Valley Business Journal. She has more than 4 Patents and more than 20 published articles.

Wise received the Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana in 2016. After the ceremony Wise shared that, “Women in Engineering is definitely a small community. There’s only so many women in engineering and there’s only so many engineers in robotics. So you’re looking at a pretty thin cross-section of a population that is not as diverse as we all hope it would be. And so sometimes it can be very challenging. But I actually think it’s harder as a start-up entrepreneur to be a woman than it is to be potentially a roboticist.”

Maren Bennewitz

Professor at the University of Bonn

Maren Bennewitz (featured in 2014) is a professor for humanoid robots and vice rector for IT at the University of Bonn and her research focuses on robots acting in human environments. She and her team have developed several innovative solutions for robotic systems co-existing and interacting with humans such as probabilistic techniques for navigation with humanoid and wheeled robots, as well as for reliably detecting and tracking humans from sensor data and analyzing their motions. She is also on the Executive Board of the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob and the Center for Mind Research since 2019.

Bennewitz’s paper was selected as one of the outstanding papers and best papers at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) and Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) in 2018. She also received one of the best paper award at the International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) and the European Conference of Mobile Robots (ECMR) in 2019. She has more than 8000 citations and 150 publications.

Bennewitz was Inspired by the participation in the Minerva project, led by Sebastian Thrun back in 1998, where she and the team programmed a robot to act as a museum tour guide in the National Museum of American History. ” My favorite thing is doing experiments on real robots evaluating novel developed techniques,” says Bennewitz. “Which is also one of my least favorite things since it is so time-consuming to get the algorithms running on real-world systems with real sensor data, even when the algorithms worked reliably in simulation before.”

Alicia Casals

Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)

Alicia Casals (featured 2014) is professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) doing her research in medical robotics, mainly in the surgical field, and has been collaborating with companies and other non-academic institutions to find the solutions to the challenges that come with Integration of robotics to real situations. She has been recently cofounder of two companies in the robotic medical field.

Casals received the “Nit de la Robòtica” award as recognition of her research and professional career, awarded in 2019 by the Industrial Engineers of Catalunya. She has been active as referent model that drives scientific and technical vocations amongst young women while taking into account the human side within the area. Casals is significantly involved with the IEEE, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology (IEEE RAS and IEEE EMBS), European Robotics Network (EURON), and founded the Spanish Robotics Chapter.

In this 2015 Oral History for Engineering and Technology History Wiki, Casals describes what got her started in robotics, her projects, her startup experience and her message to all the young roboticists, “It’s important to think on the ethics of robotics, on the efficiency of the work, and so trying to really solve what the problem is, because it’s a very wide area, so it’s easy that the projects solve things but don’t reach anything in particular. But because robotics has a wide field of applications, and they can be very good and can be used as an assistant tool. We are working in the medical field, so we basically work in robotics for aiding people. So that is a fantastic area of research we consider.”

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Women in Robotics Update: Ecem Tuglan, Tuong Anh Ens, Sravanthi Kanchi, Kajal Gada, Dimitra Gkatzia

Women In Robotics — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 01:02:05 +0000

Welcome to the first of our Women in Robotics Spotlights, where we share stories from women who haven’t yet been featured in our Annual Showcase but who are working on all sorts of interesting projects. We hope these stories provide inspiration to everyone to join us working in the field of robotics. And if you’re a woman working in robotics, why not contribute your story too!

“Making robots communicate with humans in natural language is a fascinating challenge. There is a lot going on during interactions between robots and humans. Humans make gestures, observe or interact with visible objects in the environment, and display emotions. What motivates me is equipping social robots with the ability to interact seamlessly, by recognizing a given situation and talking about it” says Dimitra Gkatzia who specializes in Natural Language Generation for Human-Robot Interaction.

Ecem Tuglan

The Mecademi of Team Think Tank | Cofounder of Fenom Robotics

Ecem Tuglan is a The Mecademi of Team Think Tank and Cofounder of Fenom Robotics who is active Robopsychologist working on Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Neurophilosophy, Human-Robot interaction, Biopolitics, Robopsychology, Cognitive Sciences and Political Theory. At Fenom Robotics, she and her team builds holograms displaying humanoid robots. She is also working on projects with Dr. Ravi Margasahayam from NASA as a robopsychologist.

Tuglan says her interest in robots started during her childhood when she prefered robotic toys and electronic gadgets and this childhood obsession turned more professional when she started studying philosophy. And still, she is always intrigued by how from micro scale to macro scale, everything is changing with robotics and how cell-like robots can save us from various diseases while AI based astrobots can find new home-planets. She enjoys the width of the research in robotics and its interdisciplinary knowledge enhancing our creativity and productivity because we are able to combine anything in our mind to this field.

Tuong Anh Ens

CEO and Founder at Go West Robotics

Tuong Anh Ens is CEO and founder of Go West Robotics which is a robotics software consulting Company. Exposed to many exciting robotics projects and having very good connections in the robotics community, she decided to focus on helping robotics companies succeed. Her main objective here was to reduce hurdles that occur for so many creative and revolutionizing ideas to take shape and get implemented. Thus, at Go West Robotics, she and her team work with the world’s leading robotics companies to build better automation systems and robots.

Ens enjoys the challenges with the future in robotics, ever-changing unknown and our ability to push beyond the boundaries of what was previously inconceivable. Going through the hurdles of both the personal and professional life balance herself, she strongly believes in hardwork and perseverance and believes in her team at Go West Robotics for the accomplishments and growth in robotics.

Sravanthi Kanchi

Data Engineer at Bayer Crop Science | The Founding Member of The Founders Vault

Sravanthi Kanchi is a data engineer at Bayer Crop Science and the founding member of the Founders Vault. She loves learning, building and researching about building robots and she is currently working to build the home cleaning robot. She enjoys the ideas coming into life in robotics. She aspires to make an impact into people’s lives by building something useful for mankind as she believes in robotics contribution in transformation of healthcare , ergonomics, space, industrial sectors etc.

Kajal Gada

Content creator at Youtube

Kajal Gada is a robotics software engineer and youtuber. She has 3 years of professional experience. At her last job at Brain Corp, she helped support Brain OS – a software for autonomous mobile vehicles. Her interest in robotics was sparked by a video of drones doing flips autonomously by her mentor who continuously encouraged her to explore robotics.

Gada started working on robotics on her own starting with creating her own robot for simple projects such as a line follower and obstacle avoidance and then further enhanced her knowledge in the area with Masters in Robotics from University of Maryland. As the way of giving back to the robotics community she creates and posts tutorials in her youtube channel for free open source software webots to create projects that are beginner friendly, and thus making it easy for anyone to get started with robotics. She has been interviewing existing women in robotics in her youtube channel as well and wants to continue it to inspire younger women and set an example of how someone looking like you started it and did it.

Dimitra Gkatzia

Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University

Dimitra Gkatzia is an associate professor at School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University where she leads a UK-funded project in robotics, CiViL. CiViL aims to provide robots with human-like abilities, such as reasoning and communicating using commonsense. She is also a co-founder of the workshop series NLG4HRI, which aims to bring together researchers interested in developing NLG methods for Human-Robot Interaction.

Gkatzia’s expertise is in Natural Language Generation (NLG), i.e. teaching computers “how to talk”, Data-to-text generation, AI, Machine Learning, summarization of time-series data. With her proficiency in this field she is dedicated to making dialogue systems (such as Alexa, Siri) converse naturally, by enhancing their responses with commonsense and world knowledge. She entertains the far-ranging scope and the endless possibilities for robotic applications. “Robotics has shown promising results in assistive technology, education, and health”, says Gkatzia who envisions a future where humans and robots coexist and collaborate in domestic, public and work settings and robots used to solve real-world problems.

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Women in Robotics Update: Ruzena Bajcsy and Radhika Nagpal

Women In Robotics — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 08:00:40 +0000

Introducing the sixth post in our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Ruzena Bajcsy and Radhika Nagpal from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013 and 2014. These women have pioneered foundational research in robotics, created organizations of impact, and inspired the next generations of robotics researchers, of all ages.

“Being an engineer at heart, I really always looked at how technology can help people? That was my model with robots, and in fact, my research in the medical area, as well as how can we make things not just empirical, but predictable, ” says Ruzena Bajcsy, expressing the motivation that guides her in both medicine and robotics.

Ruzena Bajcsy

NEC Chair and Professor at University of California Berkeley | Founder of HART

Ruzena Bajcsy (featured 2014) is a National Executive Committee (NEC) Chair and Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. She has been a pioneer in the field since 1988 when she laid out the engineering agenda for active perception. Bajcsy works on modeling people using robotic technology and is inspired by recent animal behavioral studies, especially as they pertain to navigation, namely measuring and extracting non-invasively kinematic and dynamic parameters of the individual to assess their physical movement capabilities or limitations and their respective solutions. Professor Ruzena Bajcsy became the founder of many famous research laboratories, such as, for example, the GRASP laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, CITRIS Institute and currently the HART (Human-Assistive Robotic Technologies) laboratory.

Bajcsy has accomplished and received many prestigious awards in her 60 years in Robotics. Since, last featured she has received the Simon Ramo Founders Award Recipient in 2016, for her seminal contributions to the fields of computer vision, robotics, and medical imaging, and technology and policy leadership in computer science education and research. She also received the 2020 NCWIT Pioneer in Tech Award which is awarded to the role models whose legacies continue to inspire generations of young women to pursue computing and make history in their own right. Throughout her career she has been at the intersection of human and machine ways of interpreting the world, with research interests that include Artificial Intelligence; Biosystems and Computational Biology; Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics; Human-Computer Interaction; and “Bridging Information Technology to Humanities and Social Sciences.

In her recent interview at the National Center of Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to the women who are starting in robotics and AI, she says, ” I have a few rules in my book, so to speak. First of all, when you are young, learn as much mathematics and physics as you can. It is never enough of that knowledge…….. Number two, you have to be realistic. What, with the current technology, can you verify? Because in engineering science it’s not just writing equations, but it’s also building systems where you can validate your results.”

Radhika Nagpal

Fred Kavli Professor at Harvard | Cofounder of Root Robotics

Radhika Nagpal (featured in 2013) is a Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. At her Self-Organizing Systems Research Group she works on Biologically-inspired Robot Collectives, including novel hardware design, decentralized collective algorithms and theory, and global-to-local swarm programming and Biological Collectives, including mathematical models and field experiments with social insects and cellular morphogenesis. Her lab’s Kilobots are licensed and sold by KTeam inc and over 8000 robots exist in dozens of research labs worldwide.

Nagpal has won numerous prestigious awards since 2013. She was distinguished as the top ten scientists and engineers who mattered by Nature 10 in 2014. For her excellent empowerment and contribution to next-generation, she received the McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising at Harvard in 2015. She was named an AAAI fellow & Amazon Scholar in 2020.

“Science is of course itself an incredible manifestation of collective intelligence, but unlike the beautiful fish school that I study, I feel we still have a much longer evolutionary path to walk….. There’s this saying that I love: Who does science determines what science gets done…… I believe that we can choose our rules and we can engineer not just robots, but we can engineer our own human collective, and if we do and when we do, it will be beautiful”, says Nagpal in her Ted Talk “Harnessing the intelligence of the collective” from 2017 which has more than 1 million views.

Nagpal is also a co-founder and scientific advisor of Root Robotics which has been acquired by iRobot. Here, she and her team designed Root, an educational robot that drives on whiteboards with magnet+wheels, senses colors, and draws under program control which can be used to teach programming across all ages. With Root, she aims to transform the home and classroom experiences with programming, by making it tangible and personal. “Every kid should learn to code in a fun way, that enhances their interests, and that inspires them to become creative technologies themselves,” says Nagpal.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Women in Robotics Update: Maja Mataric, Arianna Menciassi

Women In Robotics — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 17:57:43 +0000

Introducing the second of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Maja Mataric and Arianna Menciassi from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013. Since we started Women in Robotics has focused on positive role models in robotics, highlighting women’s career work, but we’d like to point out just how much energy that these amazing women extend to outreach, to inspiring and supporting their junior colleagues and to science management, supporting and advancing the increasingly complex machinery of research.

For example, Ariana Menciasi has held many editorial and technical committee roles, and manages both European and extra-European research projects, which involves extensive collaboration efforts. And Maja Mataric started the US Women in Robotics Research Database, which inspired similar initiatives in Canada, with the goal that you should always be able to find a female robotics researcher for interviews, positions, panels and conferences.

Maja Mataric

Interim Vice President at University of Southern California | Founder of Embodied Inc

Maja Matarić (featured 2013) is now Interim Vice President of Research at the University of Southern California (USC) and the founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. She is a pioneer of socially assistive robotics (SAR) which focuses on developing robots that provide therapies and care through social interaction, especially for special-needs populations; her Interaction’s Lab has worked with children with autism, stroke patients, elderly users with Alzheimer’s, and many others.

Matarić received the Distinguished Professor award at USC in 2019. She became a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2017 and in 2015 she was listed in Top 100 Inspiring Women in STEM by Insight into Diversity. Matarić was also a recipient of the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award in Innovation in 2013 and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) in 2011. She has more than 650 publications and 39000 citations and is very passionate about mentoring and empowering students and communicating the excitement of interdisciplinary research and careers in STEM to a diverse audience including K-12 students and teachers, women, and other underrepresented groups in engineering.

In 2016, Matarić founded Embodied Inc, which in 2020 launched Moxie, a socially assistive robot for child development that provides “play-based learning that is paced to weekly themes and missions with content designed to promote social, emotional, and cognitive learning”.

As Liz Ohanion at KCET said, “Maja Mataric is a robotics powerhouse and, when she’s not inspiring the next generation of engineers, she’s working on a series of robots that could very well change the lives of the people who use them.”

Arianna Menciassi

Full professor at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

Arianna Menciassi (featured in 2013) is now a full professor in Biomedical Engineering at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA). She is also a team leader of the “Surgical Robotics & Allied Technologies” Area at The BioRobotics Institute in SSSA where she has been advancing intelligent devices that permit medical or surgical procedures to be performed in a minimally invasive regime, and in an increasingly reliable, reproducible and safe way.

As Menciassi says in her interview at Autonomous Robotic Surgery :

“I am looking for solutions for giving the best care to the patients not only using scissor and knife but also using energy for example ultra sounds, focused ultra sounds, when you take a pill this is sort of autonomous treatment, this is not an autonomous robot but it is an autonomous treatment.”

Menciassi has received The Women Innovation Award, for female scientists in biomedical robotics, by WomenTech in 2017. Her SupCam project was awarded as Special Electronic Design with the Compasso d’Oro, ADI Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (Golden compass, Association for Industrial Design) in 2016 for her cost-effective and minimally invasive endoscopic device. Also, the FUTURA project, a novel robotic platform for Focused Ultrasound Surgery (FUS) in clinics, which was coordinated by Menciassi was awarded the Technology Award for the Society of Medical and Innovation Technology (SMIT) in 2015.

In an already prolific career, Menciassi has more than 19000 citations, 650 publications, 7 book chapters and almost 50 patents in her name and has been constantly improving the fields of surgical and biomedical robotics. Her vision for the future is strong, “Maybe in 30 years all drugs will be more robotic and let’s say autonomous because they will be able to reach some specific areas of the human body to treat cells or to treat a disease.”

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Women in Robotics Update: Girls Of Steel

Women In Robotics — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:27:57 +0000

“Girls of Steel Robotics (featured 2014) was founded in 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University’s Field Robotics Center as FRC Team 3504. The organization now serves multiple FIRST robotics teams offering STEM opportunities for people of all ages.

Since 2019, Girls of Steel also organizes FIRST Ladies, an online community for anyone involved in FIRST robotics programs who supports girls and women in STEM. Their mission statement reflects their commitment to empowering everyone for success in STEM: “Girls of Steel empowers everyone, especially women and girls, to believe they are capable of success in STEM.”

Girls of Steel celebrated their 10th year in FIRST robotics with a Virtual Gala in May 2020 featuring a panel of four Girls of Steel alumni showcasing a range of STEM opportunities. One is a PhD student in Robotics at CMU, two are working as engineers, and one is a computer science teacher. Girls of Steel are extremely proud of their alumni, of whom 80% are studying or working in STEM fields.

In August 2020, Girls of Steel successfully organized 3 weeks of virtual summer camps and were also able to run 4 teams in a virtual FIRST LEGO League program from September 2020. Girls of Steel also restructured their FIRST team and launched two new sub teams; Advocacy and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) focusing on continuing their efforts to advocate for after-school STEM programs, and for creating an inclusive environment that welcomes all Girls of Steel members. The DEI sub team manages a suggestion box where members can anonymously post ideas for team improvements.

In 2016, Robohub published a follow up on the Girls of Steel and their achievements.

In 2017, Girls of Steel won the 2017 Engineering Inspiration award (Greater Pittsburgh Regional), which “celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community.”

In 2018, Girls of Steel won the 2018 Regional Chairman’s Award (Greater Pittsburgh Regional), the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST.

In 2019, Girls of Steel won the 2019 Gracious Professionalism Award (Greater Pittsburgh Regional), which celebrates the outstanding demonstration of FIRST Core Values such as continuous Gracious Professionalism and working together both on and off the playing field.

And in 2020, Girls of Steel members, Anna N. and Norah O., received 2020 Dean’s List Finalist Awards (Greater Pittsburgh Regional) which reflects their ability to lead their teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission while achieving personal technical expertise and accomplishment.

Clearly, all the Girls of Steel over the last ten years are winners. Many women in robotics today point to an early experience in a robotics competition as the turning point when they decided that STEM, particularly robotics, was going to be in their future. We want to thank all the Girls of Steel for being such great role models, and sharing the joy and fun of building robots with other girls/women. It’s working! (And it’s worth it!)

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Women in Robotics Update: Elizabeth Croft, Helen Greiner, Heather Knight

Women In Robotics — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 21:06:25 +0000

“Fearless Girl should provide the spark to inspire more female engineers”, writes Elizabeth Croft, Dean and Faculty of Engineering at Monash University.

“Girls are natural engineers, highly capable in maths and physics. We need to show them that these tools can be used to design a better world….So far, we’ve done a poor job of communicating to girls the very powerful impact they can make through an engineering career.” Croft continues, providing us with the inspiration to introduce the second of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Elizabeth Croft, Helen Greiner and Heather Knight from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013.

Elizabeth Croft

Dean and Faculty of Engineering at Monash University

Elizabeth Croft (featured 2013) is now a Dean and Faculty of Engineering division at Monash University in Australia, advancing human-robot interaction, industrial robotics, trajectory generation and diversity in STEM. Previously she was the Founding Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As the Marshall Bauder Professor in Engineering Economics, Business and Management Training from 2015-2017, she launched the Master of Engineering Leadership degrees at the UBC.

Recognized as one of the 100 most powerful women in Canada in 2014 by Women’s Executive Network, Croft also received the RA McLachlan Peak Career Award for Professional Engineering in the Province of British Columbia, Canada in 2018. She is a fellow of the ASME, Engineers Australia, Engineers Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is also the recipient of other awards such as the Wendy MacDonald Award, Diversity Champion, Vancouver Board of Trade of 2016, and Just Desserts Award of University British Columbia, Alma Mater Society in 2015. She has more than 200 research publications and almost 6000 citations.

She is an advocate for women in Engineering and has an exceptional record of propelling women’s representation and participation in engineering. As the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (2010-2015), she worked with partners in funding agencies, industry, academe, and the education system on comprehensive strategies to improve women’s participation and retention in the STEM disciplines at all levels. During this period Croft successfully increased female enrollment in Engineering to 30%.

Helen Greiner

CEO, Cofounder and Founder of Tertill, iRobot and Cyphy Works

Helen Greiner (featured in 2013), is now a founder of Tertill , in addition to founding iRobot and CyPhy Works (aka Aria Insights). Tertill is a solar-powered, weed-snipping robot for home gardens patrolling throughout the day and looks somewhat like an outdoor Roomba, one of the products from iRobot, the world’s first commercially successful consumer robotics product.

Greiner has received numerous awards and accolades, including being named an “Innovator for the Next Century” by Technology Review Magazine. She received the DEMO God Award at the DEMO Conference in 2014 and was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Leadership (PAGE) by US President, Barack Obama and US Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker. She was recognized for leadership in the design, development, and application of practical robots by the National Academy of Engineering, and was named “woman of the year” at Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2018. In 2018, she was also sworn in as a Highly Qualified Expert for the US Army. You can hear her speak in 2021 at the finals of the $2m GoFly competition .

As a child Greiner became fascinated by the robots of StarWars, particularly the three-foot-tall spunky R2D2. Says Greiner “He had moods, emotions, and dare I say, his own agenda. This was exciting to me—he was a creature, an artificial creature.” Consistently pioneering in building the helping robots to perform dull, dirty and dangerous jobs and launching robotics into the consumer market since 2008, she says, “If we don’t take robots to the next level, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do to our grandchildren.”

Heather Knight

Assistant Professor at Oregon State University

Heather Knight, (featured 2013) is now an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Oregon State University and directs the CHARISMA* Research Lab. In CHARISMA Research Lab, she operationalizes methods for the performing arts to make more emotive and engaging robots, exploring minimal social robots, robot ethics, charismatic machines, and multi-robot/multi-human social interaction.

Knight has presented a TED talk: Silicon-Based Comedy in 2010 where she demonstrated a robot stand-up comedian “Data” which has gotten almost 1 million views. She was mentioned in Forbes List’s 30 under 30 in Science and named one of AdWeek’s top 100 creatives in 2017. In 2017, she was also a Robotic Artist in Residence at X, the Moonshot Factory. Her installations have been featured at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, TED, Pop! Tech, LACMA, SIGGRAPH, and the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, Italy. She is also the Assistant Director of Robotics at Humanity+ and a fellow at the Hybrid Realities Institute and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow.

She is also a founder of Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company performing comedy, dance and even Rube Goldberg Machine installations. Here, she successfully organizes the annual ‘Robot Film Festival’ which awards Botskers to various robot films and robot film stars. The film archives make for great viewing.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Women in Robotics Update: Sarah Bergbreiter, Aude Billard, Cynthia Breazeal

Women In Robotics — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 12:00:14 +0000

In spite of the amazing contributions of women in the field of robotics, it’s still possible to attend robotics conferences or see panels that don’t have a single female face. Let alone seeing people of color represented! Civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman said that “You can’t be what you don’t see”. Women in Robotics was formed to show that there were wonderful female role models in robotics, as well as providing an online professional network for women working in robotics and women who’d like to work in robotics. We’re facing an incredible skill shortage in the rapidly growing robotics industry, so we’d like to attract newcomers from other industries, as well as inspiring the next generation of girls. Introducing the first of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Sarah Bergbreiter, Aude Billard and Cynthia Breazeal from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013.

Sarah Bergbreiter

Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Principle Investigator at the Microrobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University

Sarah Bergbreiter (featured 2013) as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and acting director of Maryland Robotics Center has now moved to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a full professor, expanding the frontiers of knowledge pertaining to the actuation, sensing, power, and computational aspects of making tiny robots at Microrobotics lab at CMU.

She was made a 2019 Fellow in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for her significant and critical engineering achievements, active practice, and membership in the organization. She was the winner of the Institute of System Research’s Outstanding Faculty Award in 2017 and received the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) awards from the U.S. Army in 2019. She also made InStyle’s ’50 Badass Women’ list in 2019.

“Inspired by Star Wars, the professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon made her first foray into robotics at age 7 or 8. “I tried to build a robot to clean my room,” she recalls, laughing. Now she has loftier goals. Her robots, which can be smaller than an ant and up to the size of a Tic Tac, may eventually be used for microsurgery, search and rescue, and safety inspections for hard-to-reach spaces, like inside jet engines. She doesn’t envision a dystopian world where robots replace humans, however: “You want robots to complement humans.”

She has more than 100 publications with almost 1500 citations and her 2014 TED talk about microrobotics has been viewed 1.68 million times. She specializes in micro/nanorobots and has brought impressive capabilities in millimeter-sized jumpers which can overcome obstacles 80x their height. She collaborates with experts from biology, neuroscience, dynamics and other fields to build agile robots with mechanosensors.

Aude Billard

Professor and Director of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at EPFL

Aude Billard (featured 2013) is now a full professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA), teaching robots to perform skills with the level of dexterity displayed by humans in similar tasks. These robots move seamlessly with smooth motions. They adapt adequately and on-the-fly to the presence of obstacles and to sudden perturbations, hence mimicking humans’ immediate response when facing unexpected and dangerous situations.

Billard has been nominated for the Outstanding Women in Academia by Swiss National Science Foundation, where she is a member of the Scientific Research Council, and was also nominated to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. She is currently the vice president for publication activities of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the associate editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, elected president of the EPFL Teaching Body Assembly, and elected president of the EPFL Teachers’ Council. In 2017, Billard received a European Research Council Advanced Grant for Skill Acquisition in Humans and Robots.

She is also cofounder of AICA, a young start-up from EPFL, active in the domain of artificial intelligence and robotics, which provides novel software for creating safe and flexible installations of industrial robots, with a modular approach. She specializes in building robots that can interact with, learn from, and help humans. She has also been studying the neural and cognitive processes underpinning imitation learning in humans. She has over 500 publications and more than 18000 citations, and you can watch her plenary talk at AAAI 2020 on ‘Combining Machine Learning and Control for Reactive Robots’.

Cynthia Breazeal

Professor and Associate Director at MIT Media Lab | Founder and Director of the Personal Robots Group | Founder, Chief Scientist and Chief Experience Officer at Jibo

Cynthia Breazeal (featured 2013) is currently a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group. She is also Associate Director of the Media Lab in charge of new strategic initiatives and spearheads MIT’s K-12 education initiative on AI. She is a leading expert in designing personal robots that naturally interact with humans and specializes in balancing AI, UX design, and understanding the psychology of engagement to design personified AI technologies that promote human flourishing and personal growth.

Breazeal was recently elected as a Fellow of the AAAI Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for significant sustained contributions. She has more than 350 publications and 23000 citations, and has spoken at prominent venues such as TED, the World Economic Forum, the UN, SXSW, CES. She was recognized as a Finalist in the National Design Awards. In 2014, she received the George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Award for seminal contributions to the development of Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction.

Breazeal has also been recognized for her entrepreneurship. She is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, the pioneering crowdfunded social robot featured on the cover of TIME magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017. Her journey with Jibo isn’t over. NTT Disruption is relaunching the robot as an enterprise product in healthcare and education. Breazeal shared her experiences in a recent IROS 2020 plenary ‘Living with Social Robots: from Research to Commercialization and Back’. Make sure you watch the extra feature ‘Jibo Succeeded by Failing’ which includes the classic goodbye. We can’t wait to see the hello.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

30 women in robotics you need to know about – 2020

Women In Robotics — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 07:00:25 +0000

It’s Ada Lovelace Day and once again we’re delighted to introduce you to “30 women in robotics you need to know about”! From 13 year old Avye Couloute to Bala Krishnamurthy who worked alongside the ‘Father of Robotics’ Joseph Engelberger in the 1970s & 1980s, these women showcase a wide range of roles in robotics. We hope these short bios will provide a world of inspiration, in our eighth Women in Robotics list!

In 2020, we showcase women in robotics in China, Japan, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel, Norway, Spain, The Netherlands, India and Iran. There are researchers, industry leaders, and artists. Some women are at the start of their careers, while others have literally written the book, the program or the standards.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Members of the Kennedy Space Center government-industry team rise from their consoles within the Launch Control Center to watch the Apollo 11 liftoff through a window. Photo credit: NASA

We publish this list because the lack of visibility of women in robotics leads to the unconscious perception that women aren’t making newsworthy contributions. We encourage you to use our lists to help find women for keynotes, panels, interviews etc. Sadly, the daily experience of most women in robotics still looks like this famous NASA control room shot from the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, with one solitary woman in the team. It has taken sixty years for the trailblazers like Joann Morgan, Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Poppy Northcutt to become well known. And finally now we have a woman, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, serving as Launch Director for the upcoming Artemis Mission, and another, Gwynne Shotwell, serving as President and COO of SpaceX.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, the “Women of Launch Control” working in Exploration Ground Systems take time out of their Artemis I launch planning to pose for a photo in Firing Room 1 of the Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 4, 2020. Artemis I will be the first integrated flight test of the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket, the system that will ultimately land the first woman and the next man on the Moon. Photo credit: NASA/Glenn Benson

In 2019, women still accounted for less than a quarter (23.6%) of those working in natural and applied sciences and related occupations. In these occupations, women earned, on average, \$0.76 to every \$1.00 earned by men in annual wages, salaries, and commissions in 2018. [ref Catalyst.org ]

This issue is even more pervasive and devastating if you are a person of color. We have always strived to showcase a wide range of origins and ethnicities in our annual list, and this year, as well as four African American roboticists, our list includes the first African American female CEO of a company valued over $1Billion USD. This is just a small step forward, but we’re pleased to announce the recent launch of the Black in Robotics organization, as well as greater recognition of the citation problem.

The citation problem is expected to significantly disadvantage women and people of color due to the historical lack of women followed by the recent growth of large scientific teams, multiplying exclusion. For example, Nature recently published a paper on the impact of NumPy, a significant scientific resource. NumPy was originally developed by many contributors. But the authoritative citation is likely to belong to this description paper, which has 26 authors, all male. [ref Space Australia]

On a positive note, many individuals and organizations intentionally try to reverse this bias. For example, Tulane University just published a guide to help you calculate how much of your reading list includes female authors and a citation guide, similar to the CiteHer campaign from BlackComputeher.org. And as Bram Vanderborght, editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation magazine pointed out in the March 2020 issue, “Scientists are starting to consider how gender biases materialize in physical robots. The danger is that robot makers, consciously or not, may reinforce gender stereotypes and inadvertently create even greater deterrents for young, underrepresented people interested in joining our field.”

Fatemeh Pahlevan Aghababa

CTO and co-founder at Intelize | Technical Committee Head of International Robocup Federation | Technical Lead at Farakav co.

Fatemeh Pahlevan Aghababa is CTO and co-founder of Intelize startup which provides AI-powered solutions such as Ribona whose mission is to make a difference in Industry 4.0 via novel technologies. She is an active researcher in intelligent systems and cognitive robotic fields, and received the Silvia Coradeschi Robocup Award for “the young female scientists with distinguishing research in AI and robotics”. She is the Technical Committee Head of the International Robocup Federation, and has won the RoboCup World Championship for two consecutive years in Rescue Simulation League. Pahlevan was named among Rising Stars in VentureBeat’s Women in AI Awards.

Ariel Anders

Roboticist – Robust.AI

Carlotta Berry

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering – Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Carlotta Berry, professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, helped found and co-directs the Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity (ROSE-BUD) program with a goal of recruitment, retention and professional development of historically marginalized and minoritized populations in computer science, computer, electrical and computer engineering. Berry also worked with faculty to create Rose-Hulman’s first multidisciplinary minor in robotics and has judged and organized FIRST Robotics competitions. Berry’s research is focused on educational mobile robotics, human-robot interaction and interfaces. Berry has also mentored and organized robotics programs for Girl Scout groups and visited elementary, middle, and high schools to motivate student’s interests in STEM.

Avye Couloute

Gen Arm 2Z Ambassador/ Founder of Girls into Coding

Avye Couloute is a multitalented 13-year-old, with a passion for coding from the age of 7. Avye founded Girls into Coding which is a volunteer event series empowering girls with the tools and skills to get in the tech industry. She has facilitated online and offline robotics workshops as well as raising money to provide textbooks and computer starter kits. Avye, a Gen Arm 2Z Ambassador, is also the recipient of The Diana Award’s Legacy Award and the winner of the 2020 FDM Everywoman in Technology Awards.

Yael Edan

Professor, Head of ABC Robotics Lab – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU)

Yael Edan, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is Head of the Agricultural, Biological, and Cognitive Robotics Initiative. Her research is specifically focused on agricultural robotics, human-robot cooperation, systems engineering of robotics systems and adaptive sensor selection and fusion. Edan has made major contributions in the introduction and application of intelligent automation and robotic systems to the field of agriculture with several patents. Edan has been involved in many international projects, is a member of IEEE RAS and a member of ASABE where she was the Chair of the Flexible Automation and Robotics/Mechatronics and BioRobotics committees.

Autumn Edwards

Professor – Western Michigan University

Autumn Edwards researches how ontological considerations, or people’s beliefs about the nature of communicators and of communication, both shape and are shaped by their interactions with social robots, as an emergent class of digital interlocutor. She is co-founder/co-director of the Communication and Social Robotics Labs (combotlab.org), Professor of Communication at Western Michigan University, and founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Human-Machine Communication. She inspires passionate support from students and fellow staff, receiving the University Distinguished Teaching Award (2014), the Kim Giffin Research Award from the University of Kansas and was designated a Claude Kantner Research Fellow at Ohio University.

Marwa ElDiwiny

Researcher – University of Twente

Marwa ElDiwiny is a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel whose current research focus is on modelling and simulating self-healing soft materials for industrial applications. Her master thesis was UAV anti-stealth technology for safe operation. She has worked as a research engineer at Inria, Lille nord Europe, research scholar at Tartu Institute of Technology and lecturer in the Mechatronics and Industrial Robotics Program at Minia university, Egypt. Eldiwiny hosts the IEEE RAS Soft Robotics Podcast where researchers from both academia and industry are interviewed about the soft robotics field, with over 94 episodes available.

Aicha Evans

CEO – Zoox

Aicha Evans is the CEO of Zoox, the company developing purpose-built, zero-emission autonomous vehicles with end to end autonomy software stack. Evans is a former senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Intel Corporation where she drove Intel’s long-term strategy to transform from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company. Evans spent 10 years in various engineering management positions at Rockwell Semiconductors, Conexant, and Skyworks, before Intel. Evans is also on the Supervisory Board of SAP and is the first AfricanAmerican female CEO of a billion dollar company.

Elena Garcia Armada

Co-Founder – Marsi Bionics. Senior Researcher – Centre for Automation and Robotics

Elena Garcia Armada is a tenured researcher at the Spanish National Research Council and co-founder of Marsi Bionics. She is an expert in pediatric exoskeletons optimized for active gait rehabilitation of children suffering from neuromuscular diseases. She has won over 30 awards, is a member of the Innovation and Knowledge Transfer Working Group of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, a member of the Industrial Activities Board of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and on the jury of the Princess of Asturias Scientific and Technical Research Awards. She is passionate about helping children walk again.

Keiko Homma

Senior Researcher Service Robotics Research Team, Robot Innovation Research Center – AIST

Keiko Homma is a senior researcher at AIST in the Assistive Robotics Research Team, Human Augmentation Research Center. She received B.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Engineering from the University of Tokyo, and was a visiting researcher at Aalto University. Her current research interests include assistive and robot systems, particularly their safety aspects, and has developed a risk assessment tool for assistive robots and test dummies for exoskeleton typed physical assistant robots. She is also an IEEE RAS Distinguished Lecturer.

Michelle J. Johnson

Associate Professor & Director of Rehabilitation Robotics Lab – University of Pennsylvania

Michelle J. Johnson is an associate professor of the departments of physical medicine and rehabilitation, and of bioengineering at University of Pennsylvania, and directs the Rehabilitation Robotic Research and Design Laboratory in the Pennsylvania Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine which is affiliated with the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab. Johnson’s PhD is in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Her research specialization is in the design, development, and therapeutic use of novel, affordable, intelligent robotic assistants to quantify upper limb motor function in adults and children at risk of or with brain injury. She is also a US Fulbright Scholar.

Hadas Kress-Gazit

Associate Professor – Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and ICRA2022 Program Chair

Hadas Kress-Gazit is an Associate Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Her research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation and more specifically on synthesis for robotics – automatically creating verifiable robot controllers for complex high-level tasks. Her group explores different types of robotic systems including modular robots, soft robots and swarms, and synthesizes ideas from robotics, formal methods, control, hybrid systems and human-robot interaction. She has received multiple recognitions and awards for her research, her teaching and her advocacy for groups traditionally underrepresented in robotics.

Bala Krishnamurthy

CEO – Mobile Software Inc

Bala Krishnamurthy is a pioneer in robotics. From her early days at Unimation to her current role as CEO of Mobile Software. Krishnamurthy has over 40 years of experience in researching, designing and developing embedded real-time systems and software. She adapted the VAL language designed for PUMA robots to the hydraulic Unimate robots, then led the team at Engelberger’s HelpMate Robotics developing the software that allowed autonomous courier robots to navigate throughout hospitals. Krishnamurthy was also a member of NASA’s Office of Exploration Systems research proposal review panel for Human and Robotic Technology and authored dozens of technical articles.

Sam MacDonald

President – Deep Trekker

Sam MacDonald is President and cofounder of Deep Trekker, a Canadian made ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) for economical underwater robotic exploration. After working in automation and at Blackberry in marketing, Macdonald founded her own marketing leadership company. She then started Deep Trekker in 2009 taking it from garage to global company. Today, Deep Trekker has expanded into a host of verticals, including aquaculture, commercial diving, salvage, military, first responders, oil and gas, energy, marine surveying, wastewater, infrastructure and recreation, and sells products in 80 countries.

Karon Maclean

Professor – University of British Columbia, Director – SPIN The Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group

Karon MacLean is a Professor in Computer Science at UBC, with degrees in Biology and Mechanical Engineering and time spent as a professional robotics engineer and haptics / interaction researcher at Interval Research, Palo Alto. MacLean’s research specializes in haptic interaction: cognitive, sensory and affective design for people interacting with the computation we touch, emote and move with and learn from, from robots to touchscreens and the situated environment. MacLean leads UBC’s Designing for People interdisciplinary research cluster and is Special Advisor, Innovation, and Knowledge Mobilization to UBC’s Faculty of Science.

Chris Macnab

Associate Professor – University of Calgary

Chris Macnab is an associate professor at the University of Calgary. She earned a BEng in Engineering Physics from the Royal Military College of Canada and a PhD from the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, where she investigated control of flexible-joint space robots using neural networks. Macnab has worked as a control systems designer for Dynacon Enterprises, as part of a team that developed and tested a control system for an antenna on the space station. She has also worked for CRS Robotics, programming robot movements. Macnab’s specialization is in control systems, motion control, and robotics.

Shauna McIntyre

CEO – Sense Photonics

Shauna McIntyre is CEO at Sense Photonics, developer of high-performance, scalable 3D vision systems with offices in San Francisco, North Carolina and the UK. She is an automotive industry veteran who has led Google’s automotive services and Google Maps’ automotive programs. Mclntyre was also Chief of Staff for Google’s consumer electronics division and serves on the Board of Directors of Lithia Motors. Mclntyre brings a track record of driving innovation in traditional industries and a long-standing mission to deliver new, breakthrough experiences to industrial and automotive companies through intelligent hardware.

Elena Messina

Group Leader, Manipulation & Mobility – National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Elena Messina leads the Intelligent Systems Division’s Manipulation & Mobility Systems Group at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. She also manages the Engineering Laboratory’s Robotic Systems for Smart Manufacturing Program. Messina founded key efforts to develop test methodologies for measuring performance of robots, which range from long-term use of robotic competitions to drive innovation to consensus standards for evaluating robotic components and systems. Messina has received three Department of Commerce Bronze Medals for Superior Performance and Technical Leadership, and the Edward Bennet Rosa Award for research and development leading to standardized test methods for emergency response robots.

Linda Nagata

SciFi Writer, Owner – Mythic Island Press

Linda Nagata is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Hawaii, best known for her high-tech science fiction, including the far-future adventure series, Inverted Frontier, and the near-future thriller, The Last Good Man. Nagata is most recognized for her Nanotech Succession series, which is considered exemplary of the Nanopunk genre. Nagata’s work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards. She has also won the Nebula award, and is a two-time Locus award winner.

Samia Nefti-Meziani

Founder and Head, Professor – Salford University,University of Salford’s Autonomous Systems and Advances Robotics Research Centre

Samia Nefti-Meziani is a Professor at Salford University UK, where she is founder of the ASAR Centre. She is a veteran and one of the pioneers in Soft Robotics and low cost cross-sectorial robotics systems and their application in many sectors including Manufacturing, Nuclear, Space, Autonomous cars and Healthcare. Nefti-Meziani runs several large UK and European research programs, and regularly appears on TV and radio. She is also a Cofounder and Executive Board Member of the UK’s National Robotics Network, former Vice Chairman of IEEE RAS UK and a member of the UK-Government Robotics Growth Partnership.

Nicci Rossouw

CEO – Exaptec

Nicci Rossouw is CEO and founder of Exaptec, a provider of social, service and telepresence robots. Rossouw specializes in robotics automation solution design and delivery using a Robotics-as-a-Service as a business model. Rossouw has provided robotic telepresence solutions to educational facilities and businesses to augment communication and movement for disabled and incapacitated people. Exaptec was one of Westpac’s top Businesses of Tomorrow winners.

Yulia Sandamirskaya

Applications Research Lead, Neuromorphic Computing Lab – Intel Labs

Yulia Sandamirskaya is a senior researcher at Intel Labs leading a group developing applications of Intel’s neuromorphic research chips. Sandamirskaya was also a group leader in the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. Sandamirskaya specializes in perception, movement control, memory formation, and learning in embodied neuronal systems, and implemented neuronal architectures in neuromorphic devices, interfaced with robotic sensors and motors. Sandamirskaya has served as the chair of EUCOG, the European Society for Artificial Cognitive Systems, and as coordinator of the NEUROTECH project.

Katherine Scott

Developer Advocate – Open Robotics

Katherine Scott is a Developer Advocate at Open Robotics, the maintainers of ROS and Ignition Gazebo, and sits on the board of the Open Source Hardware Association. Scott was Cofounder and Software Lead at Tempo Automation, a manufacturer of low-volume electronics, served as Director of Research and Development at Sight Machine, a leader in manufacturing analytics, and worked as a computer vision engineer. Along the way, Scott developed a large part of the SimpleCV Python library, and several innovative software prototypes in the fields of computer vision, graphics, augmented reality, and robotics.

Hazlina Selamat

Associate Professor – Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Director – Apt Touch Sdn Bhd, Research Fellow – Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIRO)

Hazlina Selamat is an Associate Professor at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, an active member of the university’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics (CAIRO), Founding Member for the Malaysian Society for Automatic Control Engineers (MACE). She is the co-founder and Director of Apt Touch Sdn Bhd, a company that designs, develops, and manufactures fuel injection systems for small engines. Her projects include developing the optimization engine for an energy management system, and the pre-commercialization of a retrofit fuel injection kit for carburetor engines. Her interests are adaptive control, online system identification and application of control to the high-order and nonlinear systems.

Elizabeth Sklar

Research Director and Professor – Agrirobotics and University of Lincoln and Kings College of London

Elizabeth Sklar is a Professor at the University of Lincoln and King’s College London, UK, where she heads the Centre for Robotics Research. Sklar is a veteran of MIT/Lincoln Lab, a Founder Trustee of the RoboCup Federation, a Fulbright Scholar 2013-2014, former member of the Board of Directors for the IFAAMAS, and sits on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Autonomous Agents & MultiAgent Systems. Sklar specializes in interaction for multi-robot and human-robot systems, and shared decision making by applying computational argumentation-based dialogue to human-agent and human-robot systems.

Allison Thackston

Staff Software Engineer, Manager Shared Autonomy – Waymo

Allison Thackston has a passion for solving practical problems with robotics. She currently leads a team solving some of the toughest problems in self-driving technology at Waymo. Thackston was previously the Engineering Lead and Manager of the Shared Autonomy Robotics team at Toyota Research Institute and was the Lead Engineer for Robotic Perception on Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot on the International Space Station. Thackston is experienced in robust task and motion planning, manipulation, and applied computer vision.

Liane Thompson

CEO – Aquaai Norway AS

Liane Thompson is the CEO of Aquaai, a marine robotics company that uses data to improve our understanding of ocean health by collecting and delivering real-time visual and environmental data to a web-based dashboard. Thompson’s company has grown from a daughter’s idea into a full-fledged production, with a global VC backed brand. Norwegian salmon producer Kvarøy Fiskeoppdrett is working with Aquaai’s bio-inspired finned robots to monitor fish behavior and conditions at their fish farms. Aquaai has been awarded Top Aquaculture Innovation Award 2019 Fish2.0 Global Forum, an Innovation Norway grant, as well as being selected to Australia’s TekFish Challenge.

Claire Tomlin

Charles A. Desoer Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences – UC Berkeley

Claire Tomlin is a professor at the University of California Berkeley, where she holds the Charles A. Desoer Chair in Engineering. She specializes in control of safety-critical systems applied to air traffic control automation and unmanned air systems, and is known for her pioneering work developing methods for verifying the safe range of operation for hybrid systems. Tomlin is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the IEEE and AIMBE, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the IEEE Transportation Technologies Award, and an honorary doctorate from KTH.

Janet Wiles

Professor – University of Queensland

Janet Wiles is Professor of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Queensland, where she leads a multidisciplinary team studying social robotics and has pioneered the use of robots in Indigenous communities. She also leads the Future Technologies thread at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language developing Human Centred AI for language technologies and making AI tools available to a broad range of users. She is in the Human Centred Computing discipline in UQ’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Wiles specializes in human-robot interaction, language technologies, bio-inspired computation, visualization and artificial intelligence, complex systems modelling in biology and neuroscience, human memory, language, and cognition.

Rong Xiong

Professor at Zhejiang University – Institute of Cyber Systems and Control, Zhejiang University

Rong Xiong is a professor and head of the Robotics Laboratory at Zhejiang University, co-director of the ZJU-UTS Joint Center on Robotics Research, international trustee of RoboCup, and expert member for a special project on intelligent robots. Ministry for Science and Technology, China. Her group is known for their work developing humanoid robots that can play table tennis with each other and also compete with human players. Xiong received first prizes at the Scientific and Technological Award, and Teaching Achievement of Zhejiang Province. Xiong’s research specialization includes visual recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, motion planning, and control for robots.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2019 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

30 women in robotics you need to know about – 2019

Women In Robotics — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 09:33:41 +0000

From Mexican immigrant to MIT, from Girl Power in Latin America to robotics entrepreneurs in Africa and India, the 2019 annual “women in robotics you need to know about” list is here! We’ve featured 150 women so far, from 2013 to 2018, and this time we’re not stopping at 25. We’re featuring 30 inspiring #womeninrobotics because robotics is growing and there are many new stories to be told.

So, without further ado, here are the 30 Women In Robotics you need to know about – 2019 edition!

Alice Agogino

CEO & CTO – Squishy Robotics

Squishy robots are rapidly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration, developed from the research at the BEST Lab or Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities Lab. Prof. Alice Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Product Design Concentration Founder and Head Advisor, MEng Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and has a long history of combining research, entrepreneurship and inclusion in engineering. Agogino won the AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award in 2012 and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring in 2018.

Danielle Applestone

CEO & CoFounder – Daughters of Rosies

While working at Otherlab, Danielle Applestone developed the Other Machine, a desktop CNC machine and machine control software suitable for students, and funded by DARPA. The company is now known as Bantam Tools, and was acquired by Bre Pettis. Currently, Applestone is CEO and CoFounder of Daughters of Rosie, on a mission to solve the labor shortage in the U.S. manufacturing industry by getting more women into stable manufacturing jobs with purpose, growth potential, and benefits.

Cindy Bethel

Professor and Billie J. Ball Endowed Professorship in Engineering – Mississippi State University

Prof. Cindy Bethel’s research at MSU ranges from designing social robots for trauma victims to mobile robots for law enforcement and first responders. She focuses on human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction and interface design, robotics, affective computing, and cognitive science. Bethel was a NSF Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Research Fellow (CIFellow) at Yale University, is the Billie J. Ball Endowed Professorship of Engineering, the Director of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems (STaRS) Lab, and is the 2019 U.S. – Australian Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Sonja Betschart

Co-Founder & Chief Entrepreneurship Officer – WeRobotics

Sonja Betschart is the Co-Founder and Chief Entrepreneurship Officer of WeRobotics, a US/Swiss based non-profit organization that addresses the Digital Divide through local capacity and inclusive participation in the application of emerging technologies in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania. Betschart is a passionate “”Tech for Good”” entrepreneur with a longstanding career in SME’s, multinationals and start-ups, including in the drone industry and for digital transformation initiatives. She holds Master degrees both in Marketing and SME Management and has been voted as one of Switzerlands’ Digital Shapers in 2018.

Susanne Bieller

General Secretary – International Federation of Robotics (IFR)

Dr. Susanne Bieller is General Secretary, of The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), a non-profit organization representing more than 50 manufacturers of industrial robots and national robot associations from over twenty countries. Before then, Dr Bieller was project manager of the European Robotics Association EUnited Robotics. After completing her PhD in Chemistry, she began her professional career at the European Commission in Brussels, then managed the flat-panel display group at the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) in Frankfurt.

Noramay Cadena

Managing Partner – MiLA Capital

Noramay Cadena is an engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and former nonprofit leader. She’s the Cofounder and Managing Director of Make in LA, an early stage hardware accelerator and venture fund in Los Angeles. Since launching in 2015, Make in LA’s venture fund has invested over a million dollars in seed stage companies who have have collectively raised over 25 million dollars and created jobs across the United States and in several other countries. Previously Cadena worked in aerospace with The Boeing Company, and cofounded the Latinas in STEM Foundation in 2013 to inspire and empower Latinas to pursue and thrive in STEM fields.

Madeline Gannon

Principal Researcher – ATONATON

Madeline Gannon is a multidisciplinary designer inventing better ways to communicate with machines. Her recent works taming giant industrial robots focus on developing new frontiers in human-robot relations. Her interactive installation, Mimus, was awarded a 2017 Ars Electronica STARTS Prize Honorable Mention. She was also named a 2017/2018 World Economic Forum Cultural Leader. She holds a PhD in Computational Design from Carnegie Mellon University, where she explored human-centered interfaces for autonomous fabrication machines. She also holds a Masters in Architecture from Florida International University.

Colombia Girl Powered Program

Girl Powered – VEX

The Girl Powered Program is a recent initiative from VEX and the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, showcasing examples of how women can change the world, providing tools to enable girls to succeed, and providing safe spaces for them to do it in. Girl Powered focuses on supporting diverse creative teams, building inclusive environments, and redefining what a roboticist looks like.

Verity Harding

Co-Lead, DeepMind Ethics and Society – DeepMind

Verity Harding is Co-Lead of DeepMind Ethics & Society, a research unit established to explore the real-world impacts of artificial intelligence. The unit has a dual aim: to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all. Prior to this Verity was Head of Security Policy for Google in Europe, and previously the Special Adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Sir Nick Clegg MP, with responsibility for Home Affairs and Justice. She is a graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford University, and was a Michael Von Clemm Fellow at Harvard University. In her spare time, Verity sits on the Board of the Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Lydia Kavraki

Nora Harding Professor – Rice University

Prof. Lydia Kavraki is known for her pioneering works concerning paths for robots, reflected in her influential book Principles of Robot Motion. A professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University, she is the developer of Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM), a system that uses randomizing and sampling-based motion planners to keep robots from crashing. She’s also the recipient of numerous accolades, including an ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Fellowship and the ACM Athena Award in 2017/2018.

Dana Kulic

Professor – Monash University

Prof. Dana Kulić develops autonomous systems that can operate in concert with humans, using natural and intuitive interaction strategies while learning from user feedback to improve and individualise operation over long-term use. She serves as the Global Innovation Research Visiting Professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and the August-Wilhelm Scheer Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich. Before coming to Monash, she established the Adaptive Systems Lab at the University of Waterloo, and collaborated with colleagues to establish Waterloo as one of Canada’s leading research centers in robotics.

Jean Liu

President – Didi Chuxing

Jean Liu runs the largest mobility company in China, rapidly innovating in the smart cityscape. A native of China, Liu, 40, studied at Peking University and earned a master’s degree in computer science at Harvard. After a decade at Goldman Sachs, Liu joined Didi in 2014 as chief operating officer. During Liu’s tenure, Didi secured investments from all three of China’s largest internet service companies — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. It also bought Uber’s China operations in China and has announced a joint venture with the Japan’s Softbank. Liu is outspoken about the need for inclusion and women’s empowerment, also the role of technology in creating a better society.

Amy Loutfi

Professor at the AASS Research Center, Department of Science and Technology – Örebro University
Prof. Loutfi is head of the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems at Örebro University. She is also a professor in Information Technology at Örebro University. She received her Ph.d in Computer Science with a focus on the integration of artificial olfaction on robotic and intelligent systems. She currently leads one of the labs at the Center, the machine perception and interaction lab (www.mpi.aass.oru.se). Her general interests are in the area of integration of artificial intelligence with autonomous systems, and over the years has looked into applications where robots closely interact with humans in both industry and domestic environments.

Sheila McIlraith

Professor – University of Toronto
Prof. Sheila McIlraith researches knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and is known for her practical contributions to next-generation NASA space systems and to emerging Web standards. She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). In 2018, McIlraith served as program co-chair of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18). In 2011 she and her co-authors were honoured with the SWSA 10-year Award, recognizing the highest impact paper from the International Semantic Web Conference.

Nancy McIntyre

Community Innovation Manager – REC Foundation
Nancy McIntyre has a Masters in Education and over 23 years of experience as a science teacher. As a coach and organizer, she has seen the impact of competition robotics programs in preparing young women for a career in STEM, whether it be an aerospace engineer or doing biomedical research. Since 2012, McIntyre has been the Regional Manager of the REC (Robotics Education & Competition) Foundation in the California and Silicon Valley region. Currently, she is also the Community Innovation Manager for the new global Girl Powered program run by VEX and REC Foundation.

Malika Meghjani

Assistant Professor – Singapore University of Technology
Dr. Meghjani received her PhD degree in Computer Science from McGill University, Canada, then was a Research Scientist and Technical Lead at Autonomous Vehicle Lab within Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). She was awarded SMART Postdoctoral Fellowship for her research proposals on “Multi-Class Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand System” and “Context and Intention Aware Planning under Uncertainty for Self-Driving Cars”. Her work on “Multi-Target Rendezvous Search”, was nominated as the finalist for the best paper award at IEEE/RSJ IROS. A start-up proposal based on her work, titled, “Multi-Agent Rendezvous on Street Networks”, won her the NSERC Strategic Network Enhancement Initiative Award.

Cristina Olaverri Monreal

BMVIT Endowed Professorship and Chair for Sustainable Transport Logistics 4.0 – Johannes Kepler University
Prof. Cristina Olaverri-Monreal graduated with a Master’s degree in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science and Phonetics from the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich and received her PhD in cooperation with BMW. She worked several years internationally in industry and academia. Currently she is full professor and holds an BMVIT Endowed Professorship and Chair for Sustainable Transport Logistics 4.0 at Johannes Kepler University Linz, in Austria. Her research in Intelligent Transportation Systems focuses on minimizing the barrier between users and road systems with automation, wireless communication and sensing technologies.

Wendy Moyle

Program Director – Menzies Health Institute
Prof. Wendy Moyle’s research focus is in the areas of ageing and mental health, specifically neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Her research aims to achieve the best evidence possible for care of people with dementia and to reduce the distresses of the disease for the individual and their carers. She is internationally recognised for her research with social robots and assistive technologies. In 2012, she was invited to be advise the World Health Organization (WHO) Consultation Group on the Classification of Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Neurocognitive disorders for ICD-11. Currently, she is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth.

Yukie Nagai

Project Professor and Director of Cognitive Developmental Robotics Lab – University of Tokyo
Prof. Yukie Nagai is Director of the Cognitive Developmental Robotics Lab at the University of Tokyo, where she studies the neural mechanisms of human cognitive development using computational and robotic technologies, designing neural network models for robots to learn to acquire cognitive functions, in order to better understand the causes for social difficulties with among people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Nagai received her Ph.D. in Engineering from Osaka University in 2004, was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) from 2004 to 2006, at Bielefeld University from 2006 to 2009, a Specially Appointed Associate Professor with Osaka University in 2009, and a Senior Researcher with NICT in 2017. Since April 2019, she is a Project Professor with the University of Tokyo.

Temitope Oladokun

Robotics Trainer – TechieGeeks
Temitope Oladokun is a Robotics Trainer who teaches robotics to high school and primary school students. After finishing her Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Maiduguri, Oladokun has focused on her company TechieGeeks and also volunteer work to alleviate poverty and spread science and techology literacy in Lagos, Nigeria. Since joining #WomenInRobotics, Oladokun is keen to set up mentorships between African students and overseas.

Svetlana Potyagaylo

SLAM Algorithm Engineer – Indoor Robotics
Svetlana Potyagaylo received her PhD in Aerospace Engineering on Planning and Operational Algorithms for Autonomous Helicopters at Technion-Machon Technologi Le’ Israel. She then developed an underwater autonomous robotic system for inspection and monitoring of aquacultures as part of the research project AQUABOT co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus, before returning to Technion as a research scientist. Potyagaylo is now an engineer at Indoor Robotics, a stealth mode startup.

Suriya Prabha

Founder & CEO YouCode
Suriya Prabha is the founder and CEO of YouCode, on a mission to teach rural Indian children AI skills, starting with remote villages and schools in Tamilnadu, India. Her curricula develops computational thinking via play, so robots are an integral part of the AI class. She believes that every small town and village in India should have the opportunity to learn about electronics and coding to help build a Intellectual, Innovative & Incredible India. So far she has trained 2500 students in 25 schools and is campaigning to get an AI lab in all government run schools.

Amanda Prorok

Assistant Professor – University of Cambridge
Amanda Prorok is a Lecturer in Cyber-Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge, UK. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where she worked on networked robotic systems. Her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland, addressed the topic of localization with ultra-wideband sensing for robotic networks. Her dissertation was awarded the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) award for the best thesis at EPFL in the fields of Computer Sciences, Automatics and Telecommunications. Further awards include Best Paper Award at DARS 2018, Finalist for Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at ICRA 2017, Best Paper at BICT 2015, and MIT Rising Stars 2015.

Ellen Purdy

Director, Emerging Capabilities & Prototyping Initiatives & Analysis Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense
Ellen M. Purdy currently serves as the Director, Emerging Capabilities & Prototyping Initiatives & Analysis in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (R&E). She is responsible for rapid development of fieldable prototypes and capability supporting emerging needs in autonomy, communications, sensing, and electronic warfare, with a focus on assessing resilience of new capabilities against adaptive adversaries. Previously, Purdy served as the Enterprise Director, Joint Ground Robotics where she had oversight of the unmanned ground systems portfolio, strategic planning for ground robotics and the annual RDT&E funding for ground robotic technology development, and where ground robotics inventory grew from under 1000 systems to over 6000 under her tenure.

Signe Redfield

Engineer – Naval Research Laboratory
Signe A. Redfield is currently working on the DARPA Robotic Servicing of Geostationary Satellites (RSGS) project as the Payload Mission Manager Lead. Prior to joining NRL in 2014, she was an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division in Panama City, Florida, supporting autonomous robotics projects and providing expertise gained during a three-year tour as the Associate Director for Autonomy and Unmanned Systems at the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG) in London. She is currently participating in a NATO Research Task Group focused on autonomy in limited-communications environments, and is part of the working group that developed the first IEEE RAS standard, covering core ontologies for robotics and automation.

Marcela Riccillo

Specialist in Artificial Intelligence & Robotics – Professor Machine Learning & Data Science
Prof. Marcela Riccillo specializes in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. She has more than 15 years of experience in
companies like IBM, carrying out consulting projects in predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, information management and Artificial Intelligence applied to the industry. She was also a robotics columnist for Radio Palermo, part of the Jury in the TV show Eureka of Canal Encuentro, and writes about robotics and AI for popular magazines, courses and seminars. She currently works as a Professor in Data Science and Machine Learning at ITBA.

Selma Sabanovic

Associate Professor – Indiana University Bloomington
Prof. Selma Sabanovic works in human-robot interaction focusing on the design, use, and consequences of socially interactive and assistive robots in different social and cultural contexts. Sabanovic was a Visiting Professor at Bielefeld University’s Cluster of Excellence Center in Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Science, Technology and Society in 2008/2009, and a visiting scholar at the Intelligent Systems Institute in AIST, Tsukuba, Japan and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Maria Telleria

Cofounder and CTO – Canvas
Maria Telleria is co-founder and CTO of Canvas – a startup making new machines for construction that empower the current workforce to be more productive and free from repetitive, physically taxing, and dangerous tasks. She moved from Mexico when she was 14, and then discovered a passion for robotics through robotics clubs. She studied Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and went on to do a PhD there studying centimeter-scale robotics (tools that can get into small places) and “no barcode” machines (inexpensive, low-energy use robotics feasible for one-time use).

Ann Whittaker

Head of People and Culture – Vicarious Surgical
Ann Whittaker is Head of People and Culture at Vicarious Surgical. Previously, she was co-founder of Rethink Robotics, and held high-level administration and communications roles in educational, philanthropic and life sciences organizations. Her past affiliations include MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the David Rockefeller Jr. Family Office, Millennium Pharmaceuticals and PAREXEL International Corporation. Ann holds a Bachelor of Arts from the American University and an MBA from Babson College.

Jinger Zeng

Community & Partnership – Auterion
Jinger Zeng is a technologist and entrepreneur. A mechanical engineer by training, she led a team in the development of a net-zero solar house that won international awards when she was at University of Nevada Las Vegas. She then co-founded Dronesmith Technologies in 2014, a company that develops drone hardware and software for developers and corporates. She graduated from Women’s Startup Lab and Techstars IoT. Currently, she works for Swiss startup Auterion, which builds open source infrastructure for autonomous robots. Her role is to develop global partnerships bringing state-of-art drone innovations to market.

Want to keep reading? There are 150 more stories on our 2013 to 2018 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year! Want to show your support in another fashion? Join the fashionistas with your very own #womeninrobotics tshirt, scarf or mug.

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at https://womeninrobotics.org

25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2018

Women In Robotics — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 11:00:24 +0000

From driving rovers on Mars to improving farm automation for Indian women, once again we’re bringing you a list of 25 amazing women in robotics! These women cover all aspects of the robotics industry, both research, product and policy. They are founders and leaders, they are investigators and activists. They are early career stage and emeritus. There is a role model here for everyone! And there is no excuse – ever – not to have a woman speaking on a panel on robotics and AI.

But to start, here’s some news about previous nominees (and this is just a sample because we’ve showcased over 125 women so far and this is our 6th year).

In 2013, Melonee Wise was just launching her first startup! Since then she’s raised $48 million USD for Fetch Robotics and Fetch and Freight robots are rolling out in warehouses all over the world! Maja Mataric’s startup Embodied Inc has raised $34.4 million for home companion robots. Amy Villeneuve has moved from President and COO of Kiva Systems, VP at Amazon Robotics to the Board of Directors of 4 new robotics startups. And Manuela Veloso joined the Corporate & Investment Bank J.P. Morgan as head of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research.

In 2014, Sampriti Bhattacharya was a PhD student at MIT, since then she has turned her research into a startup Hydroswarm and been named one of Forbes 30 most powerful young change agents. Noriko Kageki moved from Kawada Robotics Corp in Japan to join the very female friendly Omron Adept Technologies in Silicon Valley.

2015’s Cecilia Laschi and Barbara Mazzolai are driving the Preparatory action for a European Robotics Flagship, which has the potential to become a 1B EUR project. The goal is to make new robots and AIs that are ethically, socially, economically, energetically, and environmentally responsible and sustainable. And PhD candidate Kavita Krishnaswamy. who depends on robots to travel, has received Microsoft, Google, Ford and NSF fellowships to help her design robots for people with disabilities.

2015’s Hanna Kurniawati was a Keynote Speaker at IROS 2018 (Oct 1-5) in Madrid, Spain. As were nominees Raquel Urtasun, Jamie Paik, Barbara Mazzolai, Anca Dragan, Amy Loutfi (and many more women!) 2017’s Raia Hadsell was the Plenary Speaker at ICRA 2018 (May 21-25) in Brisbane, Australia. And while it’s great to see so many women showcased this year at robotics conferences – don’t forget 2015 when the entire ICRA organizing committee was comprised of women.

ICRA 2015 Organizing Committee

2016’s Vivian Chu finished her Social Robotics PhD and founded the robotics startup Diligent Robotics with her supervisor Dr Andrea Thomaz (featured in 2013). Their hospital robot Moxi was just featured on the BBC . And 2016’s Gudrun Litzenberger was just awarded the Engelberger Award by the RIA, joining 2013’s Daniela Rus. (The RIA is finally recognizing the role of women after we/Andra pointed out that they’d given out 120 awards and only 1 was to a woman – Bala Krishnamurthy in 2007 – and are now also offering grants for eldercare robots and women in robotics.)

We try to cover the whole globe, not just the whole career journey for women in robotics – so we welcome a nominee from Ashesi University in Ghana to this year’s list! So, without further ado, here are the 25 Women In Robotics you need to know about – 2018 edition!

Crystal Chao

Chief Scientist of AI/Robotics – Huawei

Crystal Chao is Chief Scientist at Huawei and the Global Lead of Robotics Projects, overseeing a team that operates in Silicon Valley, Boston, Shenzhen, Beijing, and Tokyo. She has worked with every part of the robotics software stack in her previous experience, including a stint at X, Google’s moonshot factory. In 2012, Chao won Outstanding Doctoral Consortium Paper Award, ICMI, for her PhD at Georgia Tech, where she developed an architecture for social human-robot interaction (HRI) called CADENCE: Control Architecture for the Dynamics of Natural Embodied Coordination and Engagement, enabling a robot to collaborate fluently with humans using dialogue and manipulation.

Sougwen Chung

Interdisciplinary Artist

Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist based in New York. Her work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the interaction between humans and computers. Her speculative critical practice spans installation, sculpture, still image, drawing, and performance. She is a former researcher fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and inaugural member of NEW INC, the first museum-led art and technology in collaboration with The New Museum. She received a BFA from Indiana University and a masters diploma in interactive art from Hyper Island in Sweden.

Emily Cross

Professor of Social Robotics / Director of SoBA Lab

Emily Cross is a cognitive neuroscientist and dancer. As the Director of the Social Brain in Action Laboratory (www.soba-lab.com), she explores how our brains and behaviors are shaped by different kinds of experience throughout our lifespans and across cultures. She is currently the Principal Investigator on the European Research Council Starting Grant entitled ‘Social Robots’, which runs from 2016-2021.

Rita Cucchiara

Full Professor / Head of AImage Lab

Rita Cucchiara is Full Professor of Computer Vision at the Department of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari” of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where since 1998 she has led the AImageLab, a lab devoted to computer vision and pattern recognition, AI and multimedia. She coordinates the RedVision Lab UNIMORE-Ferrari for human-vehicle interaction. She was President of the Italian Association in Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (CVPL) from 2016 to 2018, and is currently Director of the Italian CINI Lab in Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems. In 2018 she was recipient of the Maria Petrou Prize of IAPR

Sanja Fidler

Assistant Professor / Director of AI at NVIDIA

Sanja Fidler is Director of AI at NVIDIA’s new Toronto Lab, conducting cutting-edge research projects in machine learning, computer vision, graphics, and the intersection of language and vision. She remains Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. She is recipient of the Amazon Academic Research Award (2017) and the NVIDIA Pioneer of AI Award (2016). She completed her PhD in computer science at University of Ljubljana in 2010, and has served as a Program Chair of the 3DV conference, and as an Area Chair of CVPR, EMNLP, ICCV, ICLR, and NIPS.

Kanako Harada

ImPACT Program Manager

Kanako Harada, is Program Manager of the ImPACT program “Bionic Humanoids Propelling New Industrial Revolution” of the Cabinet Office, Japan. She is also Associate Professor of the departments of Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering and the University of Tokyo, Japan. She obtained her M.Sc. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2001, and her Ph.D. in Engineering from Waseda University in 2007. She worked for Hitachi Ltd., Japan Association for the Advancement of Medical Equipment, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy, before joining the University of Tokyo. Her research interests include surgical robots and surgical skill assessment.

Jessica Hodgins

Professor / FAIR Research Mgr and Operations Lead

Jessica Hodgins is a Professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, and the new lead of Facebook’s AI Research Lab in Pittsburgh. The FAIR lab will focus on robotics, lifelong-learning systems that learn continuously, teaching machines to reason and AI in support of creativity. From 2008-2016, Hodgins founded and ran research labs for Disney, rising to VP of Research and leading the labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. She has received an NSF Young Investigator Award, a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and in 2017 she was awarded the Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics. Her groundbreaking research focuses on computer graphics, animation, and robotics, with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion.

Heather Justice

Mars Exploration Rover Driver

Heather Justice has the dream job title of Mars Exploration Rover Driver, and is a Software Engineer at NASA JPL. As a 16-year-old watching the first Rover landing on Mars, she said: “I saw just how far robotics could take us and I was inspired to pursue my interests in computer science and engineering.” Justice graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a B.S. in computer science in 2009 and an M.S. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, having also interned at three different NASA centers, and working in a variety of research areas including computer vision, mobile robot path planning, and spacecraft flight rule validation.

Sue Keay

COO

Sue Keay is the Chief Operating Officer of the ACRV and in 2018 launched Australia’s first National Robotics Roadmap at Parliament House. A university medallist and Jaeger scholar, Sue has more than 20 years experience in the research sector, managing and ensuring impact from multidisciplinary R&D programs and teams. She has a PhD in Earth Sciences from the Australian National University and was an ARC post-doctoral fellow at the University of Queensland, before turning to science communication, research management, research commercialisation, and IP management. Keay is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and Chairs the IP and Commercialisation Committee for the Board of the CRC for Optimising Resource Extraction. In 2017, Keay was also named one of the first Superstars of STEM by Science & Technology Australia.

Erin Kennedy

Founder

Erin Kennedy is a robot maker and the founder of Robot Missions, an organization that empowers communities to embark on missions aimed at helping our planet using robots. She designed and developed a robot to collect shoreline debris, replicable anywhere with a 3D printer. Kennedy studied digital fabrication at the Fab Academy, and worked with a global team at MIT on a forty-eight-hour challenge during Fab11 to build a fully functional submarine. A former fellow in social innovation and systems thinking at the MaRS Discovery District’s Studio Y, Kennedy has been recognized as a finalist in the Lieutenant Governor’s Visionaries Prize (Ontario), and her previous robotic work has been featured in Forbes, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum, and on the Discovery Channel.

Kathrine Kuchenbecker

Director at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems / Associate Professor

Katherine J. Kuchenbecker is Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, on leave from the Department of Computer and Information Science at UPenn. Kuchenbecker received her PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2006. She received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Academic Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Best Haptic Technology Paper at the IEEE World Haptics Conference. Her keynote at RSS 2018 is online. Kuchenbecker’s research expertise is in the design and control of robotic systems that enable a user to touch virtual objects and distant environments as though they were real and within reach, uncovering new opportunities for its use in interactions between humans, computers, and machines.

Jasmine Lawrence

Technical Program Manager – Facebook

Jasmine Lawrence currently serves as a Technical Program Manager on the Building 8 team at Facebook, a research lab to develop hardware projects in the style of DARPA. Previously, she served as a Technical Program Manager at SoftBank Robotics where she lead a multidisciplinary team to create software for social, humanoid robots. Before that she was a Program Manager at Microsoft on the HoloLens Experience team and the Xbox Engineering team. Lawrence earned her B.S. in Computer Science, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and her M.S. in Human Centered Design & Engineering from U of Washington. At the age of 13, after attending a NFTE BizCamp, Jasmine founded EDEN BodyWorks to meet her own need for affordable natural hair and body care products. After almost 14 years in business her products are available at Target, Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreens, Amazon.com , Kroger, HEB, and Sally Beauty Supply stores just to name a few.

Jade Le Maître

CTO & CoFounder – Hease Robotics

Jade Le Maître spearheads the technical side of Hease Robotics, a robot catered to the retail industry and customer service. With a background in engineering and having conducted a research project about human-robot interaction, Le Maître found her passion in working in the science communication sector. Since then she has cofounded Hease Robotics to bring the robotics experience to the consumer.

Laura Margheri

Programme Manager and Knowledge Transfer Fellow – Imperial College London

Laura Margheri develops the scientific program and manages the research projects at the Aerial Robotics Laboratory at the Imperial College London, managing international and multidisciplinary partnerships. Before joining Imperial College, she was project manager and post doc fellow at the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. Margheri has an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering (with Honours) and the PhD in BioRobotics (with Honours). She is also member of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics and of the euRobotics Topic Group on Aerial Robotics, with interdisciplinary expertise in bio-inspired robotics, soft robotics, and aerial robotics. Since the beginning of 2014 she is the Chair of the Women In Engineering (WIE) Committee of the Robotics & Automation Society.

Brenda Mboya

Undergraduate Student – Ashesi University Ghana

Brenda Mboya is just finishing a B.S. in Computer Science at Ashesi University in Ghana. A technology enthusiast who enjoys working with young people, she also volunteers in VR at Ashesi University, with Future of Africa, Tech Era, and as a coach with the Ashesi Innovation Experience (AIX). Mboya was a Norman Foster Fellows in 2017, one of 10 scholars chosen from around the world to attend a one week robotics atelier in Madrid. “Through this conference, the great potential robotics has, especially in Africa, been reaffirmed in my mind.” said Mboya.

Katja Mombaur

Professor at the Institute of Computer Engineering (ZITI) – Heidelberg University

Katja Mombaur is coordinator of the newly founded Heidelberg Center for Motion Research and full professor at the Institute of Computer Engineering (ZITI), where she is head of the Optimization in Robotics & Biomechanics (ORB) group and the Robotics Lab. She holds a diploma degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Stuttgart and a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Heidelberg University. Mombaur is PI in the European H2020 project SPEXOR. She coordinated the EU project KoroiBot and was PI in MOBOT and ECHORD–GOP, and founding chair of the IEEE RAS technical committee on Model-based optimization for robotics. Her research focuses on the interactions of humans with exoskeletons, prostheses, and external physical devices.

Devi Murthy

CEO – Kamal Kisan

Devi Murthy has a Bachelors degree in Engineering from Drexel University, USA and a Masters in Entrepreneurship from IIM, Bangalore. She has over 6 years of experience in Product Development & Business Development at Kamal Bells, a sheet metal fabrications and components manufacturing company. In 2013 she founded Kamal Kisan, a for-profit Social Enterprise that works on improving farmer livelihoods through smart mechanization interventions that help them adopt modern agricultural practices, and cultivate high value crops while reducing inputs costs to make them more profitable and sustainable.

Sarah Osentoski

COO – Mayfield Robotics

Sarah Osentoski is COO at Mayfield Robotics, who produced Kuri, ‘the adorable home robot’. Previously she was the manager of the Personal Robotics Group at the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, CA. Osentoski is one of the authors of Robot Web Tools. She was also a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University working with Chad Jenkins in the Brown Robotics Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, under Sridhar Mahadevan. Her research interests include robotics, shared autonomy, web interfaces for robots, reinforcement learning, and machine learning. Osentoski featured as a 2017 Silicon Valley Biz Journal “Women of Influence”.

Kirsten H. Petersen

Assistant Professor – Cornell University

Kirstin H. Petersen is Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is interested in design and coordination of bio-inspired robot collectives and studies of their natural counterparts, especially in relation to construction. Her thesis work on a termite-inspired robot construction team made the cover of Science, and was ranked among the journal’s top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2014. Petersen continued on to a postdoc with Director Metin Sitti at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems 2014-2016, and became a fellow with the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems in 2015. Petersen started the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab in 2016 as part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Cornell University, and has field memberships in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering.

Kristen Y. Pettersen

Professor Department of Engineering Cybernetics – NTNU

Kristin Ytterstad Pettersen (1969) is a Professor at the Department of Engineering Cybernetics, and holds a PhD and an MSc in Engineering Cybernetics from NTNU. She is also a Key Scientist at the Center of Excellence: Autonomous marine operations and systems (NTNU AMOS) and an Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). Her research interests include nonlinear control theory and motion control, in particular for marine vessels, AUVs, robot manipulators, and snake robots. She is also Co-Founder and Board Member of Eelume AS, a company that develops technology for for subsea inspection, maintenance, and repair. In 2017 she received the Outstanding Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and in 2018 she was appointed Member of the Academy of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

Veronica Santos

Assoc. Prof. of UCLA Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering / Principal Investigator – Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Laboratory

Veronica J. Santos is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA, and Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Lab. She is one of 16 individuals selected for the Defense Science Study Group (DSSG), a two year opportunity for emerging scientific leaders to participate in dialogues related to US security challenges. She received her B.S. from UC Berkeley in 1999 and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mech. Eng. with a biometry minor from Cornell University in 2007. Santos was a postdoctoral research associate at the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC where she worked on a team to develop a novel biomimetic tactile sensor for prosthetic hands. She then directed the ASU Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program and ASU Biomechatronics Lab. Santos has received many honors and awards for both research and teaching.

Casey Schulz

Systems Engineer – Omron Adept

Casey Schulz is a Systems Engineer at Omron Adept Technologies (OAT). She currently leads the engineering and design verification testing for a new mobile robot. Prior to OAT, Schulz worked at several Silicon Valley startups, a biotech consulting firm, and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Labs.Casey received her M.S in Mech. Eng. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 for NSF funded research in biologically inspired mobile robotics. She received her B.S from Santa Clara University in 2008 by building a proof-of-concept urban search and rescue mobile robot. Her focus is the development of new robotics technologies to better society.

Kavitha Velusamy

Senior Director Computer Vision – BossaNova Robotics

Kavita Velusamy is the Senior Director of Computer Vision at BossaNova Robotics, where she builds robot vision applications. Previously, she was a Senior Manager at NVIDA, where she managed a global team responsible for delivering computer vision and deep learning software for self-driving vehicles. Prior to this, she was Senior Manager at Amazon, where she wrote the “far field” white paper that defined the device side of Amazon Echo, its vision, its architecture and its price points, and got approval from Jeff Bezos to build a team and lead Amazon Echo’s technology from concept to product. She holds a PhD in Signal Processing/Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science.

Martha Wells

Author

Martha Wells is a New York Times bestselling author of sci-fi and speculative fiction. Her Hugo award-winning series, The Murderbot Diaries, is about a self-aware security robot that hacks its “governor module”. Known for her world-building narratives, and detailed descriptions of fictional societies, Wells brings an academic grounding in anthropology to her fantasy writing. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University, and is the winner of over a dozen awards and nominations for fiction, including a Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Locus Award.

Andie Zhang

Global Product Manager – ABB Collaborative Robotics

Andie Zhang is Global Product Manager of Robotics at ABB, where she has full global ownership of a portfolio of industrial robot products, develops strategy for the company’s product portfolio, and drives product branding. Zhang’s previous experience includes 10+ years working for world leading companies in Supply Chain, Quality, Marketing and Sales Management. She holds a Masters in Engineering from KTH in Stockholm. Her focus is on collaborative applications for robots and user centered interface design.

Join more than 700 women in our global online community https://womeninrobotics.org and find or host your own Women in Robotics event locally! Women In Robotics is a grassroots not-for-profit organization supported by Robohub and Silicon Valley Robotics.

And don’t forget to browse previous year’s lists, add all these women to wikipedia (let’s have a Wikipedia Hackathon!), or nominate someone for inclusion next year!

25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2017

Women In Robotics — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 07:44:39 +0000

Ada Lovelace Day on October 10 2017 is a day to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and there was no shortage of women to feature on Robohub’s annual Ada Lovelace Day “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list. (If you don’t see someone you expected then they’ll probably be on next year’s list, or on our first four lists from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 – please read them too!)

This year we are featuring women from all over the world, including early stage entrepreneurs, seasoned business women, investors, inventors, makers, educators, and organizers; we also feature early career researchers, established academics, senior scientists and politicians. The unifying characteristic of all these women is their inspirational story, their enthusiasm, their fearlessness, their vision, ambition, and accomplishments. Every year we’re inspired and hope that you are too.

It’s been a roller coaster year of tough headlines for tech diversity … In February, engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber. For some it was a wake-up call to the sexual harassment in tech culture, and for others it was just a public confirmation of what was already well-known. A series of high-profile mea culpa’s from male investors and CEOs ensued; then James Damore was fired from Google after implying that biological differences — not sexism — lie behind the gender gap.

It seems negative, but the publicity around bias, harassment and lack of diversity does provide public vindication for women like Susan Fowler, Tracy Chou, Erica Joy Baker and Ellen Pao who took stands against sexism and suffered for it. We’re now starting to see some positive outcomes. For example, Ellen Pao has just released a book, Reset, about her experience suing a prominent venture capital firm for bias and says, “My lawsuit failed. Others won’t.”

This year, Ellen Pao, Tracy Chou, Erica Joy Baker joined other women fighting against sexism and racism in the tech industry by starting Project Include, a non-profit that uses data and advocacy to accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry. Tracy Chou was also named as one of MIT Tech review’s Innovators under 35 alongside some 25 Women in Robotics alumni – Angela Schoellig [2013] and Anca Draga [2016].

Women in robotics still face challenges, even danger, such as Stella Uzochukwu-Denis and her fearless female robotics students face from Boko Haram extremists. And we all face the relentless lack of diversity and general apathy about the gender gap in our daily workplaces.

And yet robotics itself faces huge challenges. We are a very small segment of the very rich tech industry and robotics startups struggle to attract great talent. We have an opportunity to improve our diversity hiring practices to gain more recruits as well as increasing our internal innovation capacity, something that Linda Pouliot of Dishcraft writes about with elegance. As Pouliot notes, if you’re a robotics startup looking to hire, your personal network is your biggest asset — yet another reason for women in robotics to know about each other and to network, like with the Women in Robotics organization.

Speaking of networks, we’re biased towards the countries and careers that we know well. It’s a challenge to provide a representative sample of the wide range of jobs around the world that women are doing in robotics. Perhaps you can help us for next time with more nominations from other regions? Email nominations@womeninrobotics.org with suggestions.

Without further ado, here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2017. Enjoy!

Muyinatu Bell
Assistant Professor at Johns HopkinsMuyinatu A. Lediju Bell is the director of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab, a highly interdisciplinary research program to engineer and deploy innovative biomedical imaging systems that address unmet clinical needs in neurosurgical navigation, cardiovascular disease, women’s health, cancer detection and treatment. Before Johns Hopkins, she obtained a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University and spent a year abroad at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital in the UK. Dr Bell is also the recipient of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.

Jeanette Bohg
Assistant Professor at Stanford and Guest Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent SystemsJeannette Bohg is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Stanford and Guest Researcher at the Autonomous Motion Department of MPI. Her research focuses on perception for autonomous robotic manipulation and grasping, and she is specifically interested in developing methods that are goal-directed, real-time and multi-modal such that they can provide meaningful feedback for execution and learning. Before joining the Autonomous Motion lab in January 2012, she was a PhD student at the Computer Vision and Active Perception lab (CVAP) at KTH in Stockholm. Her thesis on Multi-modal scene understanding for Robotic Grasping was performed under the supervision of Prof. Danica Kragic. She studied at Chalmers in Gothenburg and at the Technical University in Dresden where she received her Master in Art and Technology and her Diploma in Computer Science, respectively.

Maria Chiara Carozza
Professor of Biorobotics at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP)After graduating in Physics at the university of Pisa and obtaining a PhD in Engineering, Maria Chiara Carozza became Professor of Biorobotics. She was Director of the Research Department, Coordinator of the SSSUP Laboratory ARTS and elected Rector of SSSUP in 2007. As well as being involved in many EU and multinational projects such as CYBERLEGS, ROBOCASA, WAY, CogLaboration, Nanobiotouch, Evryon, SmartHand, Neurobotics, RobotCub and CyberHand, she is also active in politics. She was Minister of Education, University and Research in the Letta Government developing a national research program and remains active in Italian Parliament. Recipient of many awards, Dr Carozza has published more than 80 ISI publications,130 papers, holds 15 patents and is active in international conferences and professional societies. Her primary interest remain improving conditions for all in society through bioengineering, HRI, humanoid robotics, intelligent environments, prosthetics, tactile sensors and artificial skin.

Helen Chan Wolf
Original Shakey Team at SRI InternationalHelen Chan Wolf joined the SRI AI Group in 1966 and worked on Shakey the world’s first mobile autonomous robot. In 2017 Shakey was honored by an IEEE Milestone. Shakey was the first robot to embody artificial intelligence, to perceive its surroundings, deduce facts, make a plan to achieve a goal, navigate from place to place, monitor execution of the plan, and improve through learning. Wolf’s job was to work with the images and extract coordinates for Shakey. Her research papers included scene analysis, image matching and map guided interpretation of remotely sensed images. She was also one of the pioneers of automated facial recognition.

Neha Chaudhry
Founder of Walk to Beat / Bristol Robotics Lab IncubatorAfter studying a Masters Degree in Marketing at UWE Bristol, Product Design Engineer Neha Chaudhry went on to develop award winning Walk to Beat. Inspired by her late grandad who suffered from Parkinson’s for 8 years, her product is a robotic walking stick with an innovative technology that gives out pulses in the handle – it’s discreet and looks good, so people feel empowered instead of disabled. She has won five prizes for her work including three awards for entrepreneurship, and the Entrepreneurship award – European Robotics Forum.

Sonia Chernova
Assistant Professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia TechSonia Chernova is the Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early-Career Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She received her Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab and as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute prior to joining Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, working on developing robots that are able to effectively operate in human environments. Her research interests span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adjustable autonomy, human computation and cloud robotics.

Maartje De Graaf
Postdoctoral Research Associate Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown UniversityMaartje De Graaf joined Brown’s Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative in 2017 with a Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to investigate the underlying psychological and cognitive processes of how people explain robot behaviors, and whether and how these processes differentiate from how people explain human behaviors. Before starting at Brown University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication Science, University of Twente, The Netherlands. She has a Bachelor of Business Administration in Communication Management, a Master of Science in Communication Studies and a PhD in Human-Robot Interaction.

Kay Firth-Butterfield
Project Head for AI and Machine Learning at World Economic Forum / Executive Committee Vice-Chair for IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in AI and Autonomous Systems / CoFounder of AI Austin Kay Firth-Butterfield is a Barrister and Judge who works on the societal impact of AI and robotics. She is also a Distinguished Scholar of the Robert E Strauss Center at the University of Texas, where she cofounded the Consortium for Law and Policy of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. She is the former Chief Officer of the Lucid.ai Ethics Advisory Panel and Vice-Chair of The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in AI and Autonomous Systems. Additionally, she is a Partner in the Cognitive Finance group and an adjunct Professor of Law. She advises governments, think tanks, businesses, inter-governmental bodies and non-profits about artificial intelligence, law and policy.

Gabby Frierson aka RoboGabby
Student at Cane Bay Middle SchoolGabby is a young middle schooler who posts about building and programming robots as “RoboGabby”. Her goal is to attract more young girls, like herself, to exploring STEM. Gabby shares tutorials on VEX IQ, ROBOTC, Robot Virtual Worlds, Python, Java and is currently shooting some new tutorials. Her sheros are Katherine Johnson and Ayanna Howard who have proved that all girls of color, or just girls in general can be into STEM, robotics and more.

Frances Gabe
VALE: 1915-2016 Inventor and roboticistFrances Gabe was a renowned inventor, and a woman ahead of her time. Daughter of a builder, she was happier on the building site than in school “which moved too slow for me”. As an adult she took issue with housework. “Housework is a thankless, unending job,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “It’s a nerve-twangling bore. Who wants it? Nobody!” Touring the US speaking to women’s groups, she self funded, and over 15 years, built her prototype house, where she lived for most of her life. She patented 68 different inventions, perhaps most cleverly her insitu dishwashing drawer and clothes laundering cupboards. But by the time she died in Dec 2016 aged 101, few people remembered her passion for automating ‘women’s work’, let alone celebrated her as the world’s first self taught female roboticist.

Simone Giertz aka Queen of Shitty Robots
Inventor, Youtuber and DIY Astronaut Simone Giertz started building robots as a child, however it wasn’t the career she had planned, which ranged from studying physics in Stockholm, to being an MMA sports journalist and working on Sweden’s website. She started a youtube channel for her comedy sketches and ended up showing off her ‘shitty robots’ and blowing up the internet. In an interview with Paper she describes how she got tired of being too serious and started to enjoy everything that she did. Now Simone is in San Francisco as a part time host of Tested and continuing her own Youtube. You can support her on Patreon.

Suzanne Gildert
CoFounder & CSO of Kindred.AISuzanne Gildert is co-founder and CSO of Kindred AI building personal robots that use machine learning to recognize patterns and make decisions. She oversees the design and engineering of the company’s human-like robots and is responsible for the development of cognitive architectures that allow these robots to learn about themselves and their environments. Before founding Kindred, Suzanne worked as a physicist at D-Wave, designing and building superconducting quantum processors, and as a researcher in quantum artificial intelligence software applications. She received her PhD in experimental physics from the University of Birmingham and likes science outreach, retro tech art, coffee, cats, electronic music and extreme lifelogging. She is a published author of a book of art and poetry.

Raia Hadsell
Research Scientist at Google DeepMindRaia Hadsell joined DeepMind in London in early 2014, to extend her research interests in robotics, neural networks, and real world learning systems. After an undergraduate degree in religion and philosophy from Reed College, Raia did a computer science PhD with Yann LeCun, at NYU, focused on machine learning using Siamese neural nets (often called a ‘triplet loss’ today) and on deep learning for mobile robots in the wild. Her thesis, ‘Learning Long-range vision for offroad robots’, was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation award in 2009. She spent a post-doc at CMU Robotics Institute, working with Drew Bagnell and Martial Hebert, and then became a research scientist at SRI International, at the Vision and Robotics group in Princeton, NJ. Her current work focuses on a number of fundamental challenges in AGI, including continual and transfer learning, deep reinforcement learning, and neural models of navigation.

Sarah Hensley
MIT EECS Angle Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar at MIT & NASASarah Hensley is in the SuperUROP program at MIT which combines her undergraduate and masters EE studies with “real world research” at the Jet Propulsion Lab and the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Sarah is continuing to work on evaluating the force and torque control capabilities of Valkyrie’s series elastic actuators, in readiness for space-related tasks such as opening airlock hatches, attaching and removing power cables, repairing equipment, and retrieving samples.

Anjali Jaiprakash
Advance QLD Research Fellow, Australian Center for Robotic Vision QUTAnjali Jaiprakash is a life sciences researcher who embraces novel technologies to solve medical challenges. She has experience in the fields of medical robotics, medical devices, orthopaedics, trauman, bone and cartilage biology, with research in hospital and clinical settings. Anjali is the core scientist for 2 research teams; Developing vision and control systems for robotic knee arthroscopy; and Developing a universal retinal diagnostic system. She was also a finalist for Imperial College London’s 2016 Best Project Award and recipient of the 2017 Tall Poppy Science Award from the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.

Leslie P Kaelbling
Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Research Director of CSAIL at MITLeslie Kaelbling has previously held positions at Brown University, the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, and at Teleos Research. She received an A. B. in Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science in 1990, both from Stanford University. Prof. Kaelbling has done substantial research on designing situated agents, mobile robotics, reinforcement learning, and decision-theoretic planning. In 2000, she founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research where she currently serves as editor-in-chief. Prof. Kaelbling is an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, a former member of the AAAI Executive Council, the 1997 recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, a trustee of IJCAII and a fellow of the AAAI.

Valery Komissarova
Hardware VC at Grishin RoboticsValery Komissarova is a robotics investor with Grishin Robotics. Prior to that, she oversaw the internal and external relations at the internet company Mail.Ru Group, which is the biggest player in Eastern Europe, for 4 years, navigating the company’s communication policy through numerous M&As and IPOs as well as fast growth from 300 employees to 3,000. She has an extensive technological background in software engineering and systems architecture and has written books and articles about topics ranging from developing drivers to information security. Valery studied international business and management at Bournemouth University, and she also has a diploma from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and Certificate in IR of the Investor Relations Society UK.

Sharon (Soon Bok) Lee
CEO of Robot of the FutureThe first product from Korean startup Robot Of The Future is Windowmate – a robot windowcleaner. CEO Sharon (Soon Bok) Lee founded the company in mid 2014, developed the IP and prototypes and was selected by the Korean Govt for a Silicon Valley Startup Program. Since then, Sharon has been rolling out a global sales campaign starting with Japan and then moving to Europe, with use cases being both residential for high density apartment living and commercial. Sharon brings lengthy experience as a technology manager and CEO to Robot of the Future and was awarded the 2015 VIP ASIA Award for CEOs.

Wanxi Liu
Systems Analyst at Intuitive Surgical and Robotics BloggerWanxi Liu graduated from Stanford as a Mechanical Engineering master in June, 2015, and is currently working at Intuitive Surgical as Systems Analyst (Control/Robotics Engineer). She did her undergraduate in Optical Engineering, but her strong interests in personal assistance or service robots and medical robots lead her to developing robotic simulations, haptics applictions, and mechatronic system design. She also write regular robotics blogs. “For those of you who are interested in robotics, read Chinese, and use WeChat – search for official account ROBOTICS and you’ll find all the interesting articles I wrote about various aspects of robots. Hit Follow if you like them!”

Linda Pouliot
CoFounder of Neato & Dishcraft RoboticsLinda Pouliot is a serial entrepreneur with deep expertise in robotics, product management, operations and manufacturing. In 2004 she co-founded Neato Robotics and was VP Product Management and Operations, leading the design, development and manufacturing of Neato’s laser guided vacuum cleaner. The company is now the number two player globally in consumer robotic vacuums. After Neato, Linda became the Chief Operating Officer of Adiri (acquired by ReliaBrand), where she oversaw the redesign and manufacturing of the international award winning Adiri bottle. She then co-founded the game advertising platform Mahoot. Linda is currently the Founder/CEO of Dishcraft Robotics.

Julie Schoenfeld
Founder & CEO of StrobeJulie Schoenfeld is a serial entrepreneur, and Founder and CEO of Stobe Inc., a technology company that develops laser-imaging for self-driving cars. Recently acquired by GM for an undisclosed amount, Strobe will be folded into GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise Automation. Schoenfeld has been CEO of four other companies in her career and is adept at raising venture capital and navigating aquisitions. Her first company, Net Effect, was acquired by Ask Jeeves for $288 million in stock. More recently she helped Perfect Market navigate its aquisition by Taboola.

Catherine Simon
President and Founder of Innorobo / InnoEchoCatherine Simon is the President and Founder of Innorobo, one of Europe’s key events dedicated to the service robotics sector, which brings together robotics companies, laboratories, start-ups, inventors, SMEs and funding providers in order to drive innovation. She also founded InnoEcho, a business strategy consultancy for the new technologies sector. Innorobo began as a regional show in Lyon, France, and recently moved to Paris to reflect its recent growth; the 2017 Innorobo event ran over three days and attracted 170 exhibitors and over 7K visitors.

Raquel Urtasun
Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, Head of Uber ATG, Co-Founder of Vector Institute for AIRaquel Urtasun is the Head of Uber ATG Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. She is a world leading expert in machine perception for self-driving cars, and her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing.

Stella Uzochukwu-Denis
Program Coordinator at Odyssey Educational FoundationStella Uzochukwu-Denis is an electrical engineer and the founder of The Odyssey Educational Foundation, a Nigerian NGO that provides STEM education and robotics experiences to school children in Abuja – a region of Nigeria where militant attacks have kept hundreds of thousands of children out of school in recent years. The foundation’s main goal is to encourage children, and girls in particular, to pursue careers in science and technology. The foundation has trained well over 450 school age girls since its launch in 2013. “My utlimate goal is to ensure that kids become college-ready, career-ready and world-ready.”

Aimee van Wynsberghe
Co-Founder of Foundation for Responsible Robotics, Assistant Professor at Delft University of TechnologyAimee van Wynsberghe is assistant professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She is co-founder and president of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. She is also a member of the 4TU center for ethics and technology where she heads the robotics task force. With the help of an NWO personal research grant she is researching how we can responsibly design service robots. Her past research looked at evaluating and designing care robots.

Do you have a story to tell about how visibility helped your robotics career? Would you like to nominate someone for next year’s list? Do you want to help organize Women in Robotics events or join the Women in Robotics network? We’d love to hear from you. Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at nominations [at] womeninrobotics.org.

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25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2016

Women In Robotics — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 08:20:46 +0000

Editor’s note:

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we’re reposting our latest ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About‘ list. Over the last four years, Robohub has featured 100 inspiring women leading future developments within robotics, with plenty more for the years to come!

Our next edition will be released on Ada Lovelace Day.

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled our fourth annual ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About‘ list. That’s 100 women who have been featured to date. We’re showcasing women working in research, development, and commercialization of robotics. The role models are diverse, ranging from emeritus to early career stage. Even though the total number of women in robotics is still relatively small, we’re celebrating that women are leading the way within this field.

Role models are important. Countess Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer and an extraordinary mathematician, faced an uphill battle in the days when women were not encouraged to pursue a career in science. Fast forward 200 years, there are still not enough women in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). One key reason is clear: a severe lack of visible female role models. Women in STEM need to be equally represented at conferences, keynotes, magazine covers, or stories about technology. Although this is starting to change, it’s not happening quick enough.

To address that challenge, Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 in response to the lack of visibility of women in STEM (not the lack of women). It’s an international day celebrating the achievements of women in STEM. Everyone is encouraged to add an event or a story to the Finding Ada site.

A recent study from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford found that visibility was the missing factor preventing women from moving into leadership positions within their organization. This has a cumulative effect on career progression and earnings. These findings support an earlier study with the Anita Borg Institute, who interviewed 1800 women in technology companies. According to the authors, women reported being less likely than male counterparts to be assigned to high visibility projects, which in turn, has a negative impact on their chances for future promotions.

We’d like to think that this annual list is opening eyes from within the robotics community, and beyond. One of our 2015 listees Spring Berman wrote to Robohub and said, “I’m so grateful for the mention in Robohub’s 25 women in robotics! The president of ASU saw the article about it in our university news, and now he wants to visit our lab in mid-April to see our work. Hopefully we can get together a cool demo to show him!”

Without further ado, here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2016. Enjoy!

Nora Ayanian
Assistant Professor and Director of the ACT lab at USC
Nora Ayanian’s research focuses on creating end-to-end solutions for multirobot coordination, to enable people to use teams of robots. Ayanian is the recipient of the 2016 Okawa Foundation Research Grant and is an MIT Technology Review TR25 Top Innovator.

Catherine Ball
Founder & CEO, Remote Research Ranges / Managing Director, Elemental Strategy
Catherine Ball won Telstra Queensland Business Woman of Year (2015) for her drone work. She is an environmental scientist, author and now the CEO of an Australian startup working with the application of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) across remote communities, schools, industry, and citizen scientists. Dr. Ball is leading the call for discussions around the ethics of spatial data, aka geo-ethics.

Margarita Chli
SNF Assistant Professor at ETHZ, Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh
Margarita Chli is an SNF Assistant Professor leading the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Previously, she was a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and before that, she was at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) of ETH Zurich, where she held the post of Deputy Director, Senior Researcher and Lecturer.
Her research interest is in Computer Vision for Robotics, focusing on real-time perception for micro-aerial vehicles. Over the years, she’s been involved in a number of European projects (AEROWORKS, SHERPA, myCopter,sFly).

Vivian Chu
Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology
Vivian Chu is a Graduate Student Research Assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology, studying perception, AI and cognition, and interaction. Chu’s paper on “Using Robotic Exploratory Procedures to Learn the Meaning of Haptic Adjectives” was awarded the Best Cognitive Robotics Paper at ICRA 2013.

Mady Delvaux
European Parliament MEP
Mady Delvaux (S&D, LU) is a Member of the European Parliament. Alongside an extensive draft report on “Civil Law Rules on Robotics,” Delvaux proposes the creation of a legal framework for automation and ways to promote European industry.

Bernardine Dias
Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
M. Bernardine Dias, Ph.D., served as a member of the faculty at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, primarily affiliated with the Field Robotics Center where Dias developed Trader Bots, a robotic task allocation system. Dias is currently founder and CEO of Diyunu Consulting, dedicated to bringing robotics to marginalized populations.

Sanja Dogramadzi
Associate Professor / Reader in Robotics at UWE Bristol
Sanja Dogramadzi develops medical and assistive robots at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Her research focuses on the multidisciplinary use of robotics technologies in healthcare settings. Dogramadzi has been awarded funding in the range of £2.4M since 2009, currently supervising/managing a team of 15 post-doctoral and doctoral researchers and junior lecturers. Her team won the Best Medical Robotics Paper Award at ICRA 2016.

Anca Dragan
Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley
Anca Dragan runs the InterACT Lab at Berkeley, which focusses on algorithms for human-robot interaction. The lab works across different applications, from assistive robots, to manufacturing, to autonomous cars, and draws from optimal control, planning, estimation, learning, and cognitive science. Dragan also helped fund and servee on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI.

Kimberley Hambuchen
Human Robotic Systems Deputy Project Manager at NASA Johnson Space Center
Kimberly Hambuchen is an expert in developing novel methods for remote supervision of space robots over intermediate time delays. She has proven the validity of these methods through multiple NASA analog field tests with robots, including the JSC Space Exploration Vehicles, Centaur platforms and Robonaut 2, the ATHLETE rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Ames Research Center K-10s. She was the User Interface Lead for JSC’s entry into the DARPA Robotics Challenge, using her expertise in remote supervision of robots to guide operator interface development for the DRC robot, Valkyrie. She currently oversees NASA JSC’s participation in the collaboration of the Robot Operations Portal (ROP), which seeks to provide non-expert, web-based interfaces for operating remote robots unavailable to the greater public.

Kaijen Hsiao
CTO at Mayfield Robotics
Kaijen Hsiao has been leading innovations in robotics, artificial intelligence, and hardware/software design and development for over 15 years. Hsiao has a history of working on robotics projects that turn into well-funded startup enterprises in the US & Europe. Some of her credits include designing components for agricultural robots, home security and companion robots, service robots, and assistive robots for people with disabilities. Kaijen has worked on high-profile projects at Willow Garage, MIT (CSAIL and Media Lab), Bosch, iRobot, and now Mayfield Robotics.

M.Ani Hsieh
Associate Professor at Drexel University
Ani Hsieh focuses on bridging the gap between geophysical fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and control, and distributed multi-agent robotic systems. Hsieh currently works in the Scalable Autonomous System Laboratory at Drexel University. She is a 2011 ONR Summer Faculty Fellow, the recipient of a 2012 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, and the recipient of of 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.

Wendy Ju
Executive Director and Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Center for Design Research at Stanford University and California College of the Arts
Wendy Ju works in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces, highlighting the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

Angelica Lim
Making Pepper Sociable / Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics
Angelica Lim builds artificial intelligence for robots to interact with humans in a smart, fun, way by combining neuroscience, machine learning, and developmental psychology to model emotion. She currently works as a Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics in Paris, France. Her previous creations include robots that play music in a human ensemble, speak and gesture with expression, and recognize emotion in movement.

Gudrun Litzenberger
General Secretary and Director of Statistics at International Federation of Robotics
Gudrun Litzenberger is on the Executive Board of the International Federation of Robotics, the global not-for-profit industry association for robotics formed in 1987. The purpose of IFR is to promote and strengthen the robotics industry worldwide, to protect its business interests, to cause public awareness about robotics technologies and to deal with other matters of relevance to its members. Litzenberger also oversees the collection and interpretation of market relevant data for world-wide surveys, studies, statistics and other data on the world-wide use of robotics.

Rosanna Myers
Cofounder of Carbon Robotics
Rosanna Myers is cofounder of Carbon Robotics, building Katia – a Kick-Ass Trainable Intelligent Arm. Myers is a self-taught software developer with a background in building innovative high tech startups. Carbon Robotics was recently named as one of the Top 50 “most influential public & private companies in the global robotics industry” by the Robotics Business Review.

Erin Rapacki
Business Development at Pneubotics
Erin Rapacki is a product storyteller with robotics experience across academia and industry, in both the Boston and Silicon Valley hotspots, with projects ranging from flexible logistics, supply chain, FDA approval, consumer products, military casualty extraction, assistive devices, robotic tele-presence, and warehousing. Rapacki finds ways to catalyze the robotics market by identifying unique value propositions for new robotic products, and by creating community and cooperation between companies and thought leaders.

Carol Reiley
Co-founder / President at drive.ai
Carol Reiley is the cofounder and President of drive.ai, an artificial intelligence self-driving car startup. Reiley is also a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in robotics and computer vision, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow researching strategies for improving human and robotic interaction. Her previous works include underwater and industrial robotics at Santa Clara University, space satellites at Lockheed Martin, people detection at GE Research, and clinical development engineering as a consultant at Intuitive Surgical.

Simone Schürle
Research Fellow at Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Simone Schürle studies Micro- and Nanosystems Technologies with a focus on cancer research. In 2005 she completed a research stay at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in the field of Bio Mechanical Engineering. She gained further practical experience during internships in R&D and marketing in Nano Imprint Lithography at SUSS MicroTec in Munich, Germany. Schürle was awarded the ETH Zurich Medal for distinguished doctoral thesis in 2014 for her PhD work on the magnetic control of microrobots. She was then awared a fellowship to go to MIT working at the interface between robotics and nanomedicine. Schürle was recently awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship to work on merging wireless control of magnetic nanosystems with the engineering potential of synthetic biology. She is also co-founder of the microrobotics company MagnebotiX.

Katia Sycara
Research Professor, Director of Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University / University of Aberdeen
Katia Sycara is a Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and holds the Sixth Century Chair (part time) in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. She is also the Director of the Laboratory for Agents Technology and Semantic Web Technologies at CMU, researching multi-agent systems. Prof. Sycara is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She is also the recipient of the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2005. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Greek National Center of Scientific Research “Demokritos” Information Technology Division.

Adriana Tapus
Vice Provost / Professor at INTERFACES Graduate School, UPSay / ENSTA-ParisTech
Adriana Tapus researches the personalization of assistive robots, with a focus on life-long learning and adaptive robot behaviors. Tapus develops different models of personalized interaction applied to health-related applications, cooperation and driving tasks. Tapus currently has a HEROES grant for “Haptic Emotional Robot Experiments with Sensitive Body” as well as a DGA Fellowship, and is active as an academic journal editor, conference program chair and general chair.

Stefanie Tellex
Assistant Professor at Brown University
Stefanie Tellex works on constructing robots that seamlessly use natural language to communicate with humans, by applying probabilistic methods, corpus-based training, and decision theory to develop interactive robotic systems that can understand and generate natural language. Tellex has published at SIGIR, HRI, RSS, AAAI, IROS, and ICMI, winning Best Student Paper at SIGIR and ICMI and was named one of IEEE Spectrum’s AI’s 10 to Watch. Stefanie won the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University and recently won a NASA Early Career Faculty Award for Human-Robot Collaboration on Complex tasks.

Patricia Vargas
Associate Professor / Founding Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University, UK
Patricia Vargas is the Founding Director of the Robotics Laboratory and Associate Professor/Reader in Computer Science and Robotics at the School of Mathematical and Computer Science (MACS) at the Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is particularly interested in: Human-Robot Interaction, Evolutionary Robotics, Swarm Robotics, Computational Neuroscience and Memory Modelling, Biologically-inspired algorithms in general, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Artificial Endocrine Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, and Learning Classifier Systems, and Data Mining and Machine Learning.

Hanna Wallach
Senior Researcher / Assistant Professor / Cofounder at Microsoft Research / UMass Amherst / Women in Machine Learning
Hanna Wallach develops machine learning methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes. Her work is inherently interdisciplinary: she collaborates with political scientists, sociologists, and journalists to understand how organizations work by analyzing publicly available interaction data, such as email networks, document collections, press releases, meeting transcripts, and news articles. She also studies issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency as they relate to machine learning. Wallach’s research has had broad impact in machine learning, natural language processing, and computational social science. In 2014, she was named one of Glamour magazine’s “35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry”; in 2015, she was elected to the International Machine Learning Society’s Board of Trustees; and in 2016, she was named co-winner of the 2016 Borg Early Career Award. Hanna is committed to increasing diversity and has worked for over a decade to address the underrepresentation of women in computing. She co-founded the annual Women in Machine Learning Workshop, which is now in its eleventh year.

Lisa Winter
Product Design Engineer at Mattel, Inc.
A roboticist since childhood, Lisa Winter has 20 years experience designing and building robots. She was crowned the Robot Wars Middleweight World Champion and has been in many publications, including MAKE magazine. In 2012, Winter cofounded smart toy company Robot 11, building smart wearables and Bluetooth connected toys. She has been inventing and rapid prototyping connected devices since the beginning of the IoT movement. Winter is currently the Product Design Engineer at Mattel, developing a smart wearable baby monitor. At night she builds combat robots for ABC’s BattleBots, and dreams of ways to help animals and the environment.

Rosalie Wang
Assistant Professor at Intelligent and Assistive Technology and Systems Lab, University of Toronto / Toronto Rehabilitative Institute
Rosalie Wang’s focus is on developing and clinically evaluating intelligent systems for rehabilitation, and as clinical Occupational Therapist, she brings a unique approach to evaluating user-centered and context-relevant design for robotic assistive technologies.

Do you have a story to tell about how visibility helped your robotics career? Would you like to nominate someone for next year’s list? Do you want to help organize Women in Robotics events or join the Women in Robotics network? We’d love to hear from you. You can ask for an invitation to the Women in Robotics network here. Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013, 2014, and 2015), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at info [at] robohub.org.

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25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2015

Women In Robotics — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 04:36:13 +0000

ICRA 2015 Organising Committee

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer, and heralded symbolic logic by demonstrating future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed. She was exceptional in her era for her mathematical brilliance, but though she imagined future applications for a multitude of technological innovations, women at that time were not encouraged to speak about or publish their work, so Lovelace’s genius was appended as ‘notes’ onto the work of others and not seen as a major contribution in its own right.

The fact that the contributions of women such as Lovelace have not been celebrated until recently gives us cause to remedy the situation. Now in its third year, our list of ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About’ is both a shoutout and a call to look at what all these women in robotics have achieved!

This has been a year of extremes for women in robotics. We celebrated the news of a phenomenal ICRA — one of the premier academic robotics events worldwide, and this year brought to us by an all-female organising committee. But we also despaired that IROS, equally esteemed in academic circles, featured not a single woman delivering a keynote, plenary, or participating in many of the key discussions, such as the futurist forum or the citizen forum. The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals 2015 were similarly lacking; of the 444 robot builders representing 24 robot entrants, only 23 builders were women (though some of the most successful teams at the DRC had female team members). Given how multidisciplinary the field is, and how many different skills are required, we need to celebrate women who are achieving greatness in robotics until we are seeing more parity.

This list showcases women in a wide range of roles and career stages, from the early stage entrepreneur/academic to those who are at their peak. We’ve also featured women working in a wide range of fields: women who are inspiring young Africans, trailblazing the field of surgical robotics, and helping us beautify ourselves using technology.

The honourees on our list of 25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About – 2015 have been chosen for the resilience, perseverance and sheer brilliance they had to demonstrate to get to the top of their particular tree. Whatever your field, we hope that you find a woman doing great things in robotics to inspire you!

Many thanks to Robohub’s contributors for all their great suggestions. Here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2015:

Nancy Amato
Professor at Texas A&M
Nancy Amato is noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing, as well as her leadership in broadening participation in the industry. Her 1998 paper on probabilistic roadmap methods is one of the most important papers on this field. Among other awards, she was made an IEEE Fellow in 2010. She has been a member of the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research since 2000. She was also the Program Chair at ICRA this year.

Spring Berman
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University
Spring Berman is developing a system that would allow swarms of robotic machines to perform reliably in situations where there is little prior data about the environment they are operating in, and where GPS and radio communication are limited and unreliable. She is the recipient of the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.

Kate Darling
Research Specialist at MIT Media Lab
Mistress of machines, robot ethics and intellectual property, Kate Darling is a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and an Affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She writes for Robohub and IEEE and is passionate about the near-term societal impact of robotic technology, rethinking copyright, and patent law.

Fei-Fei Li
Director, Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, Stanford University (SAIL)
Fei-Fei Li is working to solve some of AI’s trickiest problems: image recognition, learning and language processing. Her work at SAIL has helped to create software capable of recognizing scenes in still photographs — and accurately describe them using natural language. It marks a significant step forward for AI research, and could lead to applications ranging from more intuitive image searches to robots able to make autonomous decisions in unfamiliar situations.

Propa Ghosh
Medical Director of Robotic Surgical Services at Hunterdon Medical Center
Propa Ghosh is the first female medical director of robotic surgery in the USA. She is an ambitious, forward-thinking physician with the ability to combine surgical expertise, compassionate 360 degree care, strong business acumen, and organizational skills to help develop and foster initiatives from the ground up. She is committed to excellence in medicine through the propagation of advanced surgical techniques, staying at the frontier of skill and knowledge.

Cecile Huet
Project Officer at European Commission
Cécile Huet is Deputy Head of the Robotics Unit at the European Commission and instrumental to the success of the new wave of robotics projects funded under the multi-billion dollar Horizon 2020 funding programme. Her focus is on robots that can help people and drive applications forward.

Ayorkor Korsah
Assistant Computer Science Professor at Ashesi University College | Co-founder of the African Robotics Network
Growing up in Nigeria and Ghana, Ayorko Korsah has been a technology evangelist for as long as she can remember. In the US, she discovered her love for computer science and ultimately gained a PhD in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. Korsah co-founded the African Robotics Network (AFRON) in Ghana in April 2012. Ayorkor teaches robotics and computer science at Ashesi University College, and coordinates the Ashesi Innovation Experience, a summer enrichment program that engages high school students in leadership, design, robotics and more.

Danica Kragic
Professor, Computer Science, Vice Dean, School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
Danica Kragic studies how robots interact with each other, how they sense things, and how they see and grasp objects. One of her goals is to build future systems that interact with humans and their surroundings in a natural way. A specialist in computer vision and robotics, Kragic coordinates several EU-projects in the area. She is director of the Center for Autonomous Systems and head of the Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab at KTH. She is also recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award. She is a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Young Academy of Sweden.

Kavita Krishnaswamy
Ph.D. Candidate at University of Maryland Baltimore County
Born in Tamil Nadu, India, and raised in Columbia, MD, Kavita Krishnaswamy is both a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She has worked at the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center – Quality of Life – Technology Center (QoLT) at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and IBM Business consulting services. As a professional researcher with a severe physical disability, Krishnaswamy is motivated by a powerful, innate force: achieving autonomy and independent daily living through the advancement of technology. She develops robotic systems to provide assistance and increase independence for people with disabilities, to support transferring, repositioning, and personal care, with a focus on accessible user interfaces.

Hanna Kurniawati
Lecturer at University of Queensland
Hanna Kurniawati’s research interests include robotics, motion planning, planning under uncertainty, computational geometry applications, machine learning, and randomized algorithm. Before joining UQ, she worked with Nicholas M. Patrikalakis as a Research Scientist at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Recently she helped to create the Interactive-Ball (I-Ball) — a robotic soccer ball to improve social ball game participation for people with visual impairment that uses motion sensors, high-efficiency speakers and a small UQ-developed controller that can be programmed to suit the player.

Stéphanie Lacour
Assistant professor at the School of Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Stéphanie Lacour’s has pioneered the development of semiconductor devices that can stretch and still retain their electronic properties. Her goal is the fabrication of artificial skin — human-sized integrated circuits that can conform to a robotic or human body and communicate directly with the nervous system. Her research interests lie at the intersection of engineering, materials science and biotechnology. Lacour holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology at the School of Engineering at EPFL. A MIT TR35 winner in 2006, she also claims a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society (UK), a European Research Council ERC Starting Grant, the 2011 Zonta award and the 2014 World Economic Forum Young Scientist award.

Cecilia Laschi
Professor at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy
Cecilia Laschi’s research interests are in the field of biorobotics and she is currently working on soft robotics, humanoid robotics and neurodevelopmental engineering. She has been, and currently is involved in many National and EU-funded projects, she was the coordinator of the ICT-FET OCTOPUS Integrating Project, leading to one of the first soft robots, and the European Coordination Action on Soft Robotics, RoboSoft. She is a member of the IEEE, of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and of the Robotics & Automation Society, where she served as elected AdCom member, and is Co-Chair of the TC on Soft Robotics.

Hagar Marzouk
Engineering student at Nile University
Hagar Marzouk is leader of the “Walross” team in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and first female leader of a team in the Egyptian underwater competition, ROV, 2014. She took her team to first place in Minesweepers 2014, both at the national and international competitions.

Barbara Mazzolai
Deputy Director at Center IIT
Barbara Mazzolai is the recipient of the 2010 “Marisa Bellisario” Award for her scientific and management activities in the EU DustBot project for improving the urban hygiene and the quality of life of citizens. In 2013 she was also awarded the Medal of the Senate of the Italian Republic for her scientific activities in biomimetics and biorobotics. Her current scientific activity focuses on bio-inspired soft robotics. She has project managed many European projects, including PLANTOID, and is Associate Editor of Micro-Bio Robotics, Frontiers in Bionics and Biomimetics and a member of the Editorial Board of Soft Robotics and Applied Bionics and Biomechanics. She is also a member of the IEEE, the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and the Robotics and Automation Society.

AJung Moon
PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia.
AJung Moon is a Vanier Scholar and studies human-robot interaction and robot ethics. Currently she is a visiting student at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She is a co-founder of the Open Roboethics initiative, an international roboethics think tank that investigates ways in which stakeholders of robotics technologies can work together to influence how robots should shape our future.

Yuki Nakagawa
Founder and CEO at RT Corporation
Fascinated by robots as a young child, Yuki Nakagawa has been involved in Japanese humanoid and home robotics for almost her entire career. Her life’s mission is to improve and enhance people’s quality of life through the use of robot technologies. Nakagawa’s company developed RIC90, which can wear an “animal suit” to achieve physical contact with people and can change forms. To date, RIC90 has hugged 3000 or more people and shared smiles all over the world. The company believes in the mantra: “No Physical Contact, No Service Robot” and wants to provide intelligence and sophisticated behaviour/motion animal-like robots that can work in close proximity to human beings.

Samantha Payne
Co Founder at OpenBionics | Digital Marketer | Journalist
Samantha Payne is co-Founder of Open Bionics, an award-winning startup developing low-cost effective and good looking bionic hands for amputees or those born without a hand. The company is now part of the Disney Accelerator, powered by Techstars. Payne, recently shortlisted for the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Women and Business awards, focuses on building Open Bionics’ public profile, business model, network, and raising rounds. Open Bionics has won multiple awards for innovation, most recently the prestigious James Dyson Award and the RBA50.

Angelika Peer
Professor at Bristol Robotics Lab
Angelika Peer’s research interests are in human-robot interaction (HRI) with special focus on telepresence and teleaction systems, brain and body computer interfaces, physical/haptic HRI and human motor control. Her research combines methods originating from control, robotics, mechatronics, computer science, neuroscience, and psychology. She has won numerous awards and is chair of the RAS Technical Committee on Telerobotics, a Member of the RAS Technical Committee on Haptics, Secretary of the Eurohaptics Society, and a member of the program committee of several international conferences in the fields of robotics, HRI and multimodal human-system interaction.

Louise Poubel
Software Engineer at Open Source Robotics Foundation
When Louise Poubel was a little girl, she had as much access to computers as her brother, but her father refused to give her a remote-control car even though he gave her brother one. Now she is convinced that we should “give the girls the toys” — it’s important to let kids know it’s ok for them to pursue anything they like. Poubel, who grew up in Brazil, got her engineering degree in Japan and masters degrees in Poland and France; she is a truly global citizen. She now works on the robotics simulator Gazebo, a graphical user interface (GUI), at the Open Source Robotics Foundation, with the aim of knocking down complexity and price — barriers that she believes stand between robots and people.

Wendy Roberts
CEO at future Skies | CEO at Five Elements
In 2001, Wendy Roberts founded Future Skies, which primarily develops software for the US Department of Defense. In 2012, she created Five Elements Robotics to help further US personal robotics design and manufacturing. The company’s Budgee, a friendly robot that follows you around and carries your stuff, won two Gold Stevie Awards in 2015: Technical Innovation of the Year at the American Business Awards, and New Product Award for Consumer Electronics. Roberts is currently CEO for both Future Skies and Five Elements Robotics. Five Elements is the only commercial US firm manufacturing personal service robots domestically. Based on her work with the military, Roberts has made it part of Five Elements’ mission to serve the disabled and the aging.

Noriko Takiguchi
Journalist and author
Noriko Takiguchi covers the business and technology of robotics for various newspapers and magazines in Japan, including Newsweek Japan, Diamond Online, Nikkei BP, Toyo Keizai, Newspicks, President magazine, Harvard Business Review Japanese version and AXIS. Her most recent book on the culture of Silicon Valley — Why is Garbage Not Sorted in Silicon Valley? (President,Inc., 2008) — is a collection of her weekly columns on the Nikkei BP website. She has also translated into Japanese books such as Bringing Design to Software and Engineer Imagines. Watch for her at robotics conferences and trade shows around the world.

Pree Walia
CEO & Co-Founder at Preemadonna
Entrepreneur, risk-taker, beauty junkie, and business school graduate, Pree Walia has combined a political career with leading teams at early stage hardware startups, most recently starting her own venture at the intersection of beauty and tech. Walia is co inventor of the Nailbot — a nail decorating robot that lets you paint custom designs on your fingernails — and winner of the 2015 Robot Launch international startup competition. She supports causes that empower women and young girls.

Jing Xiao
Professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Jing Xiao’s research spans robotics, haptics, and intelligent systems. She is Site Director of the US National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Robots and Sensors for Human Wellbeing. She has over 130 publications in major robotics conferences, journals and books, and holds one patent. She is an IEEE Fellow and has been elected twice as an AdCom Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Yao Zhang
Founder and CEO at Roboterra
Yao Zhang’s company, Roboterra, makes tool kits that allow students to tap their imagination and creativity to design and build their own robots. Zhang earned her Ph.D. in Education Economics at Columbia University before working for McKinsey and Co. and the Soros Foundation. She has been working in the fields of education and technology for more than a decade, and won a “Best 10 Global Citizen Service Award” from the US State Department in recognition of her outstanding work in educational innovation.

ICRA 2015 Organising Committee
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In 2015, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) — one of the world’s largest robotics conferences — had an organising committee made up entirely of women. In order to broaden the field, early career women who may be less well-known outside of their specialties were selected to serve alongside senior women on the 2015 committee. This showed that there are women experienced in every aspect of conference organisation that could be part of future committees. ICRA may well have set a precedent; leading annual Computer Vision event, CVPR, is planning to follow suit next year with a female only committee.

Then and now

The celebration wouldn’t be complete if we did not share some of the recent achievements by women from our 2013 and 2014 honour rolls:

Cynthia Breazeal has since launched Jibo with a massively successful crowdfunding campaign
Helen Greiner has launched and successfully crowdfunded the LVL 1 Drone and keynoted at ICRA 2015
Radhika Nagpal was named in 2014 among Nature’s 10 (scientists and engineers who made a difference).
Lynn Parker chaired ICRA 2015 and was appointed as Division Director for the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation (since January 2015).
Melonee Wise launched Fetch Robotics
Ekaterina Bereziy’s ExoAtlet started clinical trials.
Ayanna Howard launched Zyrobotics and was a finalist in Robot Launch

Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013 and 2014), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at info [at] robohub.org.

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25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)

Women In Robotics — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:26:33 +0000

Just last week at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella gave women some questionable career advice: “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. Because that’s good karma.” The event moderator, Professor Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College and a Microsoft director, immediately disagreed with Nadella’s advice, suggesting instead that women do their homework on salary levels and practice asking for pay raises.

Indeed, good karma seems to be slow coming. Women account for only 17% of Microsoft’s management and technical staff. It’s been calculated by the National Women’s Law Center that women still earn only 78c on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. And the consequences of not negotiating a starting salary at the beginning of one’s career can amount to the loss of millions in earnings over a woman’s lifetime.

From Hypatia to Grace Hopper, there have been many amazing women who have carved themselves out a name in the fields of science, engineering, mathematics and technology, despite the lack of financial reward. However, these comparatively few women can easily be lost from the pages of history without an ongoing push to make sure that they are represented; women are still well under 20% of the tech workforce, and role models are important.

And yet there is movement in the right direction: This spring, Harvey Mudd College broke new ground when 56% of its engineering degrees were awarded to women – the first time the college’s women graduates have outnumbered men in this discipline. And this fall, Lynne Parker announced a 50 strong all-female organizing committee for ICRA – one of the premier academic robotics events worldwide.

If Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women in science, technology, engineering and math to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields, stories like these can only inspire us to keep pushing.

In celebration we’ve once again created a short list of women in robotics that everyone should know about (see also 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)).

Although all the women listed here are doing great things, our list isn’t by any means a ranking. Rather, it is a range: from early stage to emeritus, from many different countries and in a variety of robotics disciplines; researchers, entrepreneurs and academics, innovators, artists and policy makers. In short, here are 25 more reasons why women can do anything. Please share.

25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order)

Ruzena Bajcsy
	Ruzena Bajcsy took the helm at CITRIS in November 2001, after devoting more than 30 years of her life to research in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine perception. Bajcsy’s credentials reach across the traditionally discrete fields of neuroscience, applied mechanics and computer science. She is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, a distinction few people can match.
Berkeley	Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences \| Director of CITRIS

Sampriti Bhattacharya
	Sampriti Bhattacharya is a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the department of Mechanical Engineering doing research on underwater robotics for nuclear reactor inspection. Coming from a small college in Kolkata, India, Bhattacharya realized that the opportunities for engineering research and creativity were too limited in her country. This led her to start the Lab-X Foundation to provide hands-on engineering training to those with limited resources, and to bring world class education into developing countries.
MIT	PhD Student \| Director & Founder of Lab-X Foundation

Maren Bennewitz
	Maren Bennewitz developed several innovative solutions for robotic systems co-existing and interacting with humans. Among them are probabilistic techniques for navigation with humanoid and wheeled robots as well as for reliably detecting and tracking humans from sensor data and analyzing their motions. She is currently PI on EU projects Squirrel and Rovina and the German cluster BrainLinks-BrainTools.
University of Freiburg	Juniorprofessorin of Computer Science \| Head of Humanoid Robots Lab

Ekaterina Bereziy
	Ekaterina Bereziy graduated from from Moscow State University’s mechanics and mathematics faculty, before founding ExoAtlet, Russia’s first exoskeleton startup. ExoAtlet features maneuverability, brain-to-computer interface and comfort, and the startup has won a spot in the Skolkovo IT cluster, beating 750 other startups.
ExoAtlet	Founder & CEO

Alicia Casals
	Alicia Casals is currently leading the research group on Robotics and Medical Imaging program of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering of Catalonia (IBEC), and the research group GRINS: Intelligent Robots and Systems (UPC-IBEC). The research is oriented to improve human robot interaction through multimodal perception, focused mainly in the area of medical robotics. In this field she is working in robotic systems and control strategies for rehabilitation, assistance and surgical applications. In 2001 she was one the founders of the European Robotics Network, Euron, being part of its Board until 2008. In 2004 she created the Spanish Robotics Chapter, which she led until 2006. She was Vice-President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in the period 2008-2009. Among other prizes, she received the Narcís Monturiol Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1998.
Technical University of Catalonia	Full Professor in the Automatic Control and Computer Engineering Dept \| Leader of the Robotics Group at IBEC

Elaine Chen
	Elaine Chen is an MIT-trained engineering and product development executive. She has over 20 years of experience building great teams and developing disruptive products with hardware and software components in a startup setting. She has served as a product management and product development executive for several startups at the VP level, including SensAble Technologies (now part of the Geomagic division of 3D Systems), Zeemote, Zeo, and most recently Rethink Robotics, the company that brought the revolutionary Baxter collaborative robot to market.
MIT Sloan School of Management	Senior Lecturer \| Entrepreneur in Residence at Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship \| Consultant at Concept Springs

Marita Cheng
	Marita Cheng is currently the founder and CEO of 2Mar Robotics, making robotic arms for people with disabilities. In 2008, while a mechatronics undergraduate at University of Melbourne, Marita founded Robogals, a university club to encourage girls into STEM. Robogals is now a global program of volunteers with branches at 21 universities in 5 countries. Cheng was named Young Australian of the Year in 2012.
2Mar Robotics	Founder & CEO \| Founder of Robogals

Vanessa Evers
	Vanessa Evers likes to take theories on human behaviour from social psychology and see if similar processes occur when we interact with technology. Her research focuses on Human Interaction with Autonomous Agents such as robots or machine learning systems and cultural aspects of Human Computer Interaction. Vanessa won the best thesis prize awarded by the Dutch National Society of Registered Information Specialists, was co-author of the James Chen best paper award of the journal on User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction together with her Ph.D. student Henriette Cramer. She is a member of the ACM International Human Robot Interaction Steering Committee and Associate of the Human Robot Interaction Journal.
University of Twente	Professor of Computer Science at Human Media Interaction Group

Silvia Ferrari
	Silvia Ferrari’s research aims at providing intelligent control systems with a higher degree of mathematical structure to guide their application and improve reliability. Decision-making processes are automated based on concepts drawn from control theory and the life sciences. Recent efforts have focused on optimal control problems in computational geometry and multiscale dynamical systems aimed at improving the effectiveness of mobile sensor networks, such as, acoustic and demining sensors installed on underwater vehicles and ground robots. New methods for neural network training are also being developed to retain long-term procedural memories, solving partial differential equations online, and training in-vitro and in-silico spiking neural networks to solve complex sensorimotor learning problems.
Duke University	Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science \| Director Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls & WISeNet

Maria Gini
	Maria Gini’s research covers multi-robot systems, swarm robotics, behavior-based robots, autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, auctions, distributed planning and decision making. She is the Winner of the Inaugural Distinguished Women Scholars Award, University of Minnesota, 2001, AAAI Fellow, ACM Distinguished Scientist and is the chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), a member of the AAAI Executive Council and of the board of the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Gini is also on numerous editorial boards for journals.
University of Minnesota	Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science

Ayanna Howard
	Ayanna Howard’s area of research is centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems. This work, which addresses issues of autonomous control as well as aspects of interaction with humans and the surrounding environment, has resulted in more than 130 peer-reviewed publications about a number of projects—from scientific rover navigation in glacier environments and intelligent terrain assessment algorithms for landing on Mars to assistive robots for the home. She was named a top young innovator of 2003 by MIT Technology Review, recognized as Educator of the Year in 2009 by NSBE and received the Georgia Tech Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award in 2013.
Georgia Tech	Motorola Foundation Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering \| Director Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Laboratory

Noriko Kageki
	Noriko Kageki is the business development manager for Kawada Robotics Corp, makers of Nextage, Japan’s newest two-armed industrial collaborative robot. Nextage is very good at electronics assembly and other tasks in manufacturing facilities, but has potential service applications as well. Noriko’s background is in physics, engineering and science communication. Before joining Kawada, Kageki was a robotics and technology journalist for the Nikkei and founded GetRobo, an online publication focusing on news about robots for the home and community.
Kawada Robotics Corp	Business Development Manager

Kendra Kerrisk
	Kendra Kerrisk has contributed significantly to the national and international knowledge regarding application of Automatic Milking Systems with pasture-based dairying. Kerrisk has developed a set of Management Guidelines for Pasture-Based AMS farms, which have been an extremely valuable tool for farmers adopting (and contemplating adopting) AMS across Australia and further abroad. One of the highlights of the work conducted within FutureDairy has been the involvement with the co-development of the world’s first Robotic Rotary (Automatic Milking Rotary, DeLaval AMRTM). This internationally recognised work will increase the feasibility of robotic milking for large dairy herds that are more common within the Australian and New Zealand industries.
University of Sydney	Associate Professor of Veterinary Science \| Lead Researcher Future Dairy

Maarja Kruusma
	Maarja Kruusma co-founded Intelligent Materials and Systems Lab at the Tartu University of Technology Estonia, focusing on modeling, control and mechanical design of electroactive polymer artificial muscles. In 2008, she founded the Center for Biorobotics in Tallinn University of Technology, which is an interdisciplinary research center for conducting research and development on the borderline of science and technology. Her research interests include biologically-inspired underwater robotics, computational and experimental fluid dynamics, flow sensing, robot learning and adaptation, soft body modeling and control. She is an R&D director of Fits.me, a start-up company using robotics technology for virtual online fitting rooms. She is also a member of ISTAG, an advisory body to the European Commission in the field of Information and Communication Technology, the General Chair of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics held in Tallinn at 2011 (ICAR 2011) and the coordinator of several EU projects; Fishview, Robocademy, ARROWS, FILOSE, SAFROS, and I-SUR.
Taillin University of Technology	Professor \| Head of TUT Biorobotics

Tessa Lau
	Tessa Lau is currently at Savioke creating easy-to-use robots for the services industry, like SaviOne. Lau was formerly a research scientist at Willow Garage where she developed simple, usable interfaces to robots. Before that, she was a research staff member and manager at IBM Research, leading the Smarter Web research group within Almaden’s Computer Science department. Her research goal is to develop innovative interfaces for enhancing human productivity and creativity through the use of techniques drawn from human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Lau is also on the board of the CRA-W, the CRA’s committee on the status of women in computing research, and has played several organizational roles in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
Savioke	Chief Robot Whisperer

Rezia Molfino
	Rezia Molfino is professor of Robot Mechanics, Industrial and Service Robotics, Automation and Robotics and Control of Mechanical Systems at the University of Genova. Holder of 12 patents and author of hundreds of publications, she has held numerous positions and is among other things responsible for the PMARlab (Laboratory of Design and Measurement for Automation and Robotics), President Siri (Italian Association of Robotics and Automation) Italian coordinator in IFR (International Federation of Robotics).
University of Genova	Full Professor of Robotics \| Director of the PMARlab Robotics

Mihoko Otake
	Mihoko Otake’s research topics include modeling and simulation of cognitive function of humans and electroactive polymers and their applications to design and control of intelligent systems and services. She has been an Associate Professor with Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Chiba University, Japan since 2012. She is concurrently the Founding Director of the Fonobono Research Institute (FRI) since 2007. She has been a Principal Investigator of the PRESTO Program of JST from 2010 to present on “Individually Adapted Cognitive Activity Support based on Large Scale Conversation Data”, and since 2004 to 2008 on “Development of Bilateral Multiscale Neural Simulator” respectively. For her contributions in electroactive polymer gel robots, involving beam-shaped gels curling around an object and starfish-shaped gel robots turning over, Otake was awarded the Young Investigator Award from Robotics Society of Japan.
Chiba University \| University of Tokyo	Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering \| Founding Director NPO Fonobono Research Institute

Lea Rosen
	Lea Rosen is an attorney who specializes in drones and aerial robots, privacy, data security, freedom of expression and the right of anonymity, software licenses and users’ rights, corporate liability for human rights abuses, government liability for unwarranted surveillance, and legal developments around UAS integration into the national airspace. She is a licensed member of the CA state bar. Rosen is also the Head of Research at Freedom of the Press Foundation and Director of Research at DARC. DARC is a multidisciplinary conference about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and drones—with an emphasis on civilian applications.
Attorney	Director of Research \| DARC Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference

Julie Shah
	Julie Shah has developed innovative methods for enabling fluid human-robot teamwork in time-critical, safety-critical domains, ranging from manufacturing to surgery to space exploration. She previously worked at Boeing Research and Technology on robotics applications for aerospace manufacturing. Her group draws on expertise in artificial intelligence, human factors, and systems engineering to develop interactive robots that emulate the qualities of effective human team members to improve the efficiency of human-robot teamwork. Shah is the recipient of a 2014 NSF CAREER Award, and her work was recognized by the Technology Review as one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2013.
CSAIL MIT	Boeing Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics \| Lead of the Interactive Robotics Group

Inna Sharf
	Inna Sharf has addressed numerous problems associated with the development and control of autonomous systems. Her research expertise lies in dynamics and control of robotic, mechatronic and autonomous systems and her focus in the last several years has been specifically in the areas of dynamics and control of small highly maneuverable unmanned (i.e. remotely piloted) aerial vehicles. Sharf has been involved in many collaborative projects with industry, including MDA Inc., Quanser Consulting Inc., CSA, and DRDC, four NCFRN partners, as well as academic partners in the US, Europe and Israel. These collaborations and the work of her research group resulted in numerous publications in leading conferences and journals. Sharf’s work is currently funded by NSERC and FQRNT.
McGilll University	Professor of Mechanical Engineering \| Cofounder of Aerospace Mechatronics Lab

Mari Velonaki
	Mari Velonaki has worked as a researcher and artist in the field of interactive media since 1995. Velonaki has created interactive installations that incorporate movement, speech, touch, breath, electrostatic charge, artificial vision and robotics. In 2003, Velonaki’s practice expanded to robotics, when she initiated and led a major Australian Research Council art/science research project “Fish-Bird: Autonomous Interactions in a Contemporary Arts Setting” in collaboration with robotics scientists at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR, University of Sydney). In 2007, Velonaki was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and in 2009 she was awarded an ARC Australian Research Fellowship. In 2006, Velonaki co-founded the Centre for Social Robotics (CSR). Velonaki is also the Director of the recently established Creative Robotics Lab (CRL) at NIEA.
University of New South Wales \| NIEA	Director of CRL, NIEA \| CoDirector Centre for Social Robotics, USYD \| Adjunct Assoc. Prof. Australian Center for Field Robotics, USYD

Barbara Webb
	Barbara Webb’s main research interest is in perceptual systems for the control of behaviour. The work is largely concerned with building computational and physical models of these mechanisms to explicate and evaluate hypotheses. In particular Webb focuses on insect behaviours, as their smaller nervous systems may be easier to elucidate. Recent work has focussed on some of the more complex capabilities of insects, including multimodal intergration, navigation and learning. She also has an interest in theoretical issues of methodology; in particular the problems of measurement, modeling and simulation.
University of Edinburgh	Professor of Biorobotics

Holly Yanco
	Holly Yanco’s research interests include human-robot interaction, better visualization of sensor data, adjustable autonomy, urban search and rescue, assistive technology, and robotics education. Her lab is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, Microsoft and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She founded the Robotics Lab, which consists of students at all stages of their careers, from freshmen to doctoral candidates. Research focuses on human-robot interaction (HRI), which includes multi-touch computing, interface design, robot autonomy, trust, and evaluation methods. Application domains include assistive technology, telepresence, and urban search and rescue (USAR). Yanco is also the director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center.
U Mass Lowell	Professor of Computer Science \| Director New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center

Xiaorui Zhu
	Xiaorui Zhu’s research interests include control and localization of mobile robots, flight control of unmanned helicopter, mechatronics, and medical robotics. In 2012, Zhu won the Award for National Science and Technology of China.
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen	Associate Professor \| Chair Women in Engineering IEEE RAS

Girls of Steel
	Girls of Steel is an all girl FIRST Robotics Competition team, founded in Pittsburgh in 2010. Initially, the team consisted of 24 girls from 12 different high schools, and 4 different educational options. The team now numbers almost 60 girls, with FIRST LEGO League teams. The Girls of Steel mission is to empower women in STEM, giving girls skills that go beyond building robots and last longer than high school.
FIRST Team 3504	Pittsburgh, PA

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25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)

Women In Robotics — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 21:54:50 +0000

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled a short list of some women in robotics that everyone should know about. There are so many many more that we’re already looking forward to featuring them next year. But first, simply creating this post has reopened many arguments about gender and technology and whether we even need to say that there are women who are brilliant at engineering.

From Hypatia to Grace Hopper, there have been amazing women who have fought against massive prejudice to carve themselves out a name in the fields of science, engineering, mathematics and technology. These comparatively few women however can easily be lost from the pages of history and to create a more equal ongoing presence of women in technology, we need to show strong female role models.

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer and in spite of her undoubted mathematical brilliance, she was reluctant to publish herself and made do with publishing ‘commentaries’ on the works of others. Her commentaries were far longer and more original than the originals and in the process she demonstrated the future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed but never built.

Now in its fourth year, Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women in science, technology, engineering and math who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.

Professionally, the women on our list are all field leaders with a huge impact on robotics, regardless of their gender. So if you need women for your board of directors, or conference panel etc. then you may need to look deeper, because these women are already super busy. But while there are an increasing number of women in robotics, there is nothing like equal representation so – here are 25 reasons why that should change. Please share.

Many thanks to Robohub contributors for all their great suggestions!

25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order)

Sarah Bergbreiter
	Sarah Bergbreiter packs impressive capabilities in tiny mobile robots. Her millimeter sized jumpers can overcome obstacles 80x their height, which is a record for the field. By tackling locomotion, power, actuation and fabrication at these small scales she hopes to develop technologies that could advance medicine, consumer electronics, and science.
University of Maryland	Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering \| Director of the Micro Robotics Lab

Aude Billard
	Aude Billard makes strides towards building robots that can interact with, learn from and help humans. Her work has been used for children with autism and has pushed the frontiers of machine learning.
EPFL	Associate Professor \| Director of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory

Cynthia Breazeal
	Cynthia Breazeal is a leading expert in creating personal robots that interact with humans in a natural way. She has developed some of the world’s most famous robotic creatures ranging from small hexapod robots to highly expressive humanoid robots and robot characters. Her recent work investigates the use of social robots to improve quality of life.
MIT Media Lab	Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences \| Director of the Personal Robots Group

Elizabeth Croft
	Elizabeth Croft studies how interactions with robots can be designed to naturally adapt to what their non-expert human users want them to do. Her work in human-robot interactions is highly interdisciplinary and taps into expertise in computer science, psychology, health and biological sciences.
University of British Columbia	Professor \| Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory

Missy Cummings
	Missy Cummings is a mathematician, space systems engineer and one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is currently teaching aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and researches autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction and ethics.
MIT	Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems \| Director, Humans and Automation Laboratory

Kerstin Dautenhahn
	Kerstin Dautenhahn received her Ph.D. degree from the Biological Cybernetics Department of the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, in 1993. She has published more than 300 research articles on social robotics, human-robot interaction, assistive technology and Artificial Life.
University of Hertfordshire	Professor Computer Science \| Director Adaptive Systems Research Group.

Helen Greiner
	Helen Greiner is a co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks. iRobot was the world’s first commercially successful consumer robotics product. She has degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science as well as being one of the ‘entrepreneurs and innovators of the 21st century’.
CyPhy Works	Founder and CEO

Heather Knight
	Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC creating robot performances and sensor based art. She is also founder of the Robot Film Festival and Cyborg Cabaret and a PhD student at CMU. Heather was on the 2011 Forbes List for 30 under 30 in Science. Her work also includes: robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interactive installations with Syyn Labs, field applications and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics, and she is an alumnus from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.
CMU	Doctoral research \| Marilyn Monrobot

Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi
	Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi uses living cells to power and actuate 3D robotic structures at the micro scale. Such structures could be useful for tissue engineering or 3D assembly at the microscale.
University of Tokyo

Maja Matarić
	Maja Matarić makes robots that help people. Her research in human-robot interactions and desire to solve real-world problems has lead her to design robots that can provide personalized assistance in convalescence, rehabilitation, skill training, and education.
University of Southern California	Professor and Chan Soon-Shiong Chair in Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics \| Director, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) \| Director of the Interaction Lab

Arianna Menciassi
	Arianna Menciassi designs micro- and nano-robots that can be used in biomedical applications. Examples include active endoscopic capsules or novel cell-based actuators.
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna	Associate Professor of biomedical robotics

Robin Murphy
	Robin Murphy pioneered rescue robotics with aerial and ground robots used in disasters such as the World Trade Center disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Charley, and the Crandall Canyon Utah mine collapse. She is currently leading an initiative in emergency informatics, which stems in part from witnessing valuable data from robots not reaching the right decision maker.
Texas A&M University	Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering \| Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue

Radhika Nagpal
	Radhika Nagpal studies self-organized multi-agent systems in nature and robotics. She takes inspiration from ants, termites and cellular systems to design robot swarms that can build complex structures, assemble into any shape or help pollinate fields. She also investigates models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells and insects cooperate to achieve complex tasks.
Wyss Institute – Harvard	Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science

Allison Okamura
	Allison Okamura runs the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine lab [CHARM] at Stanford, where she supervises research in haptics, teleoperation and virtual robotics. This work has applications in medicine, rehabilitation, education and user interfaces.
Stanford University	Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering \| Director of the CHARM Lab

Jamie Paik
	Jamie Paik is the founder and director of Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and a member of Swiss NCCR robotics group. RRL focuses on leveraging expertise in multi-material fabrication and smart material actuations. Her latest robots include self-morphing Robogami (robotic orgami) that transforms its planar shape to 2D or 3D by folding in predefined patterns and sequences, just like the paper art, origami.
EPFL	Assistant Professor \| Director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab

Lynn Parker
	Lynne Parker is a leader in the field of distributed multi-robot systems. Her many-robot systems have helped explore mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, sensor networks, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville	Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science \| Director Distributed Intelligence Laboratory

Daniela Rus
	Daniela Rus is director of one of the most renowned laboratories in artificial intelligence and robotics in the world (CSAIL). At the distributed robotics laboratory she designs robots at all scales, soft and hard, that can self/dis-assemble, fold, fly and distribute to advance the frontiers of robotics.
MIT	Director of CSAIL \| Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science \| Director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Angela Schoellig
	Angela Schoellig specializes in iterative/cooperative learning and data-based control for dynamic systems. Recent applications include learning fast dynamics and shared tasks for multiple UAVs. You probably saw her quadrotors dance solo or as a multi-robot ballet.
University of Toronto	Assistant Professor Institute for Aerospace Studies

Leila Takayama
	Leila Takayama is a researcher with a background in Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction. Her current focus is understanding human encounters with robots in terms of how they perceive, understand, feel about, and interact with robots. She was named one of the Tech Review’s 35 innovators under 35 as well as one of Fast Company’s 100 most creative people in business.
Google X	Senior Researcher

Andrea Thomaz
	Andrea Thomaz explores human robot interactions with Simon, her expressive humanoid robot. She has been a driving force in making robots that can learn through social interactions, an essential feat to make robots a part of our daily lives.
Georgia Tech	Associate Professor of Interactive Computing \| Director of the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab

Manuela Veloso
	Manuela Veloso is the mother of robot soccer. For years, her laboratory has been championing the Robocup competitions while exploring important questions in multi-robot control. She is currently working towards creating service robots that work symbiotically with humans.
Carnegie Mellon University	Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science

Astrid Weiss
	Astrid Weiss is a research fellow in HRI at the Vision4Robotics group. She focuses on Human-Robot Cooperation, Theory of Mind and user centered design, with an interest in the impact technology has on our everyday life and what makes people accept or reject technology.
Vienna University of Technology	Postdoctoral research fellow at ACIN Institute of Automation and Control

Mary-Anne Williams
	Mary-Anne Williams is the director of the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at UTS, Sydney. Her work includes social robotics, robot ethics and law, robotics soccer competitions, artificial intelligence, knowledge mapping and cognitive models of decision making.
UTS	Associate Dean Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology \| Director, Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab

Melonee Wise
	One of the first hires at Willow Garage, Melonee Wise has been deeply involved in the development of the PR2 and the Turtlebots. Now she is leading her own company, Unbounded Robotics, in the development of a mobile manipulating robot platform.
Unbounded Robotics	Founder and CEO

Amy Villeneuve
	With 24 years of experience in business, Amy Villeneuve has been instrumental in the rise of one of the most praised companies in robotics, Kiva Systems. Their acquisition by Amazon a few years ago at 775 million dollars made mainstream realize that robotics startups are the next big thing. At Kiva she is responsible for end-to-end customer engagement process, from sales and solution design through manufacturing, deployment and ongoing customer support.
KIVA Systems	President and COO

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