Dr. Ayanna Howard, Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University and Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean’s Chair will speak on “Socially Interactive Robots for Equitable Healthcare Outcomes” as a part of the NSF Distinguished Lecture Series. The event, to be held May 4th at 11 AM Eastern, will focus on how robots (particularly healthcare robots) and artificial intelligence can be positively integrated into everyday life and tasks. Research and development of helper robots exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to grow as people realize positive potential and impact these technologies can have on the healthcare field. Abstract Dr. Howard’s lecture will provide insights into how robots and artificial intelligence […]

As further advancements in Artificial Intelligence are made, automated processes and robotics are becoming a ubiquitous entity in the workforce. As a result, there is a growing concern among the public that robots will replace humans and cause a massive job shortage. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the “Robotics: Empowering not Replacing People” scientific session at the 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in February to address this concern in the public perception. The panel moderated by CCC Council Member, Maria Gini (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and featuring Henrik Christensen (University of California, San Diego), Michelle Johnson (University of Pennsylvania) and Julie Shah […]

Chad Jenkins, CCC Council Member, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Associate Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan will be featured as a part of the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Lecture Series on March 3rd from 11am-12:30pm EDT.  Jenkins earned his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Alma College (1996), M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (1998), and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (2003). He previously served on the faculty of Brown University in Computer Science (2004-15). His research addresses problems in interactive robotics and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on mobile manipulation, robot perception, and robot learning from […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. Khari Douglas interviews Gregory D. Hager, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. In this episode, Hager discusses medical applications for AI and robotics, tactile perception, the founding of the Malone Center, and data privacy. This will be the​ last episode of Catalyzing Computing hosted and produced by Khari, because he will be joining the editorial team at Overheard at National Geographic, “a podcast which follows explorers, photographers, and scientists to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world.” Thanks for listening […]

Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that owns big name brands such as Aspirin, Aleve, Midol, Cenesten and Iberogast, recently partnered with Ada Health, an AI-based assessment platform. This free app uses an AI chat robot to collect information on symptoms, patient history and other user targeted questions to generate data-driven suggestions for next steps and proper care. “Ada’s technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a highly comprehensive medical knowledge base, covering thousands of conditions. In fact, in a recent vignettes study testing the eight most popular online symptom assessment apps, Ada was proven to have the most comprehensive condition coverage, providing a condition suggestion 99% of the time, […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yonatan Bisk, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and member of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The Idea Language learning requires physically existing in the world (not being just a brain in a jar). A child doesn’t learn language from reading Wikipedia.  They build rich models of the world by seeing and doing.  They understand other humans as socially intelligent and cooperative agents with whom to speak and from whom to learn.  Yet, natural language “understanding” systems have focused on training in an impoverished disembodied text-only setting — trying to download as much text off the internet and […]