Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - September/October 2015 - (Page 6)

in my own words The Future Comes on Two Robotic Feet Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D. You might think from his books How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Robopocalypse, and Robogenesis that Daniel Wilson sees robots as malevolent creatures. But when he talks about robots, Wilson, who earned his Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, is relentlessly optimistic about their ability to solve important problems. He is the author of nine books, several short stories, and two comic books, as well as the developer of Mayday! Deep Space, a playable story app. Yet, as he explains here, his mind is never far from the robotics lab. . The brain of a robot The first time I really saw what a robot could do was at the University of Tulsa, when I was working on my computer science degree. I was learning about something called genetic algorithms, in which a computer solves problems based on processes that mimic natural selection. This wasn't an actual robot-it was artificial intelligence-but I saw immediately that this was the brain of a robot. That was my first experience with AI and robotics, and I immediately wanted more. Turning robots inside out I wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon because they have a huge robotics institute with every type of robot you can think of. When I got there, I was just in this wonderland of robots. There were humanoid robots and space robots and medical robots that basically walk around inside your body. I ended up working with Dr. Chris Atkeson, who half the time studies intelligent environments, and the other half, humanoid robots. If you walk into his lab on any given day, you might see a pair 6 imagine of disembodied robotic legs or $100,000 worth of cameras piled up. Baymax from Big Hero 6 was actually based on Chris's research. I was really interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning. I built robots that were turned inside out: Instead of a platform with sensors and everything mounted on the robot to help it wander through the environment, I spread sensors throughout the environment so it could respond as humans wandered through it. These are called smart houses-or intelligent environments, ubiquitous computing, or a lot of other names-but in my mind it was letting people wander around inside my robot. To observe and protect I grew up in Oklahoma. In my family there were a lot of case managers, nurses who would go out to people's homes to check in on them and see what their capabilities were. There are a lot of people in really, really isolated places. They don't interact with other people a lot, and as a result they can end up in dangerous situations. This is especially true with elderly people. Having seen this, I saw an area where I could help. That's what I was thinking in the work I did for my dissertation: I wanted to put sensors into people's houses. It was all about activity recognition-figuring out people's behavior patterns, identifying what's normal, and trying to spot any kind of functional decline. Every robot exists to solve a problem. The question to start with is, What problem do you care most about? Technology for good In the West, we've been primed to think of robots as the bad guys. They were villains in books and movies, and for a long time they didn't exist. But now robots are real and people still think they're scary. I think they would seem less scary if people knew more about the people who build robots. The people who are building the robots aren't doing it for fun and they're not doing it to rule the world. They're doing it to solve a real problem; they're trying to help people. Welcome to the future In Robopocalypse, I included all the advances I saw on the horizon, and many of them are now either here or arriving. Among the big three are intelligent personal assistants on your phone, like Siri or Cortana, that use speech recogni- Sept/Oct 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - September/October 2015

Circuit Training Electrical Engineering at CTY
Turning Brainwaves into Action Meet ARTIE, the robot activated by thoughts
Robotics in the Real World How robots are helping us explore space, overcome disability, and so much more
My First FIRST The climbing robot that taught me to aim high
Adventures in Botball
So Much Fun, It’s Inhuman Destroying the competition in combat robotics
Born to Build The making of an engineer
The Engineering Summer Academy at Penn Three weeks that launched my future
Music in the Woods Six weeks at Tanglewood
Big Picture
In My Own Words Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse and Robogenesis
Selected Opportunities and Resources
Off the Shelf Review of Obert Sky’s Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options Interview with NASA robotics engineer Jaakko Karras
One Step Ahead Be fearless
Planning Ahead for College Express lessons in financial aid
Students Review Dartmouth College
Creative Minds Imagine Poetry contest winners
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - September/October 2015