Date and time:
November 5, Time 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST / 16:00 CET / 24:00 JST
Live Stream: Zoom Webinar (https://zoom.us/j/94878540792)
Live questions and discussion: Slido (https://app.sli.do/event/4cpx6ohg)
Moderator: Raja Chatila
Panelists: Aimee van Wynsberghe, Rodney Brooks, Yoshihiko Nakamura

Title: Robotics and Society

Video on Bilibili: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1i5411L7p3/
Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ECIQLzaJHXM

Robotics is largely impacting human life in many ways. Robots can be used to replace or extend humans in hazardous environments, from industrial plants to planetary exploration. They can be used to help and assist humans, from surgery to manufacturing. They can be used to repair humans in the form of prosthesis. Automated driving might transform our future cities. Robotics is also a science for studying and building artificial intelligent machines, to better understand living beings. In 1950 Norbert Wiener wrote “The Human use of Human beings” in which he raised moral concerns about then Cybernetics - now Robotics. In the same year, Alan Turing asked “Can machines Think?” in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Clearly, robotics questions our human identity and human societies in several aspects. All this and more will be discussed in this conversation with Rodney Brooks, Aimee van Wynsberghe and Yoshi Nakamura.

 


Raja Chatila (Moderator)

Aimee van Wynsberghe

Rodney Brooks

Yoshihiko Nakamura


Raja Chatila (Moderator)

Raja Chatila

Raja Chatila is Professor at Sorbonne Université (emeritus). He is former Director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) and of the Laboratory of Excellence "SMART" on Human-Machine Interaction. He was Director of LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse France, in 2007-2010. His research covers several aspects of Robotics in robot navigation and SLAM, motion planning and control, cognitive and control architectures, human-robot interaction, machine learning, and ethics. He works on robotics projects in the areas of service, field, aerial and space robotics. He is author of over 160 international publications on these topics. He was President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 2014-2015. He is an IEEE Fellow, Chair of IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and a member of the High-Level Expert Group on AI with the European Commission.

 


Aimee van Wynsberghe

Aimee van Wynsberghe

Aimee van Wynsberghe is an Associate Professor in Ethics and Technology and Director of the TPM AI Lab at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Aimee is co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and on the board of the Institute for Accountability in a Digital Age. She is a 2018 L'Oreal Unesco 'For Women in Science' laureate. Aimee also serves as a member of the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on AI and is a founding board member of the Netherlands AI Alliance. She is a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature) and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Artificial Intelligence and Humanity. Aimee has been named one of the Netherlands top 400 influential women under 38 by VIVA and was named one of the 25 ‘women in robotics you need to know about’. She is author of the book Healthcare Robots: Ethics, Design, and Implementation and has been awarded an NWO personal research grant to study how we can responsibly design service robots. She has been interviewed by BBC, Quartz, Financial Times, and other International news media on the topic of ethics and robots and is often invited to speak at International conferences and summits.

 


Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT. He is a robotics entrepreneur and most recently was Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics. He is also a Founder, former Board Member and former CTO of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr. Brooks is the former Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Founding Fellow of AAAI, a Fellow of AAAS, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of IEEE, a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI, the IEEE Inaba Technical Award for Innovation Leading to Production in 2008, the Robotics Industry Association's Engelberger Robotics Award in 2014, and the 2015 IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award. He starred as himself in the 1997 Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture.

 


Yoshihiko Nakamura

David Vernon

Yoshihiko Nakamura received his Ph.D. from Kyoto University. After working at Kyoto University and University of California Santa Barbara, he joined the University of Tokyo. His research is in Humanoid robotics, neuro musculoskeletal human modeling, and sports science are the field of research. He is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of Robotics Society of Japan, Fellow of Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineering, Fellow of World Academy of Arts and Science, Foreign member of Academy of Engineering Sciences of Serbia and Montenegro, Distinguished Affiliated Professor of the Technical University of Munich, and President (2012-2015) of the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science.