The new Cornell Design Tech department in collaboration with Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is looking for exceptional and truly interdisciplinary faculty candidates. If that is you, please apply here: or contact me for more details!

I told @THR that AI is by definition conservative and therefore can't be truly funny. Why?. All Supervised Learning does, including your ML model-du-jour, is "average" the past to imagine the present, and that's literally what being conservative means.

I am sure we will see the usual performative concern about why there are so few women in computer science. This is why. #WomenInTech.

Sad and ironic to see how the organizers of @theofficialacm @FAccTConference (with "Fairness" in its very name) are unwilling to accommodate the schedules of mothers of young children, forcing them to make impossible choices between childcare and career.

If you are an educator or student and don't have access to the PDF, please email / DM me for a copy.

Ever wondered why social #robots look the way they do? #design. So happy to announce a new chapter written by Belinda Dunstan and myself. I've wanted to write about this stuff for a long time, and loved working on it with Belinda during my Sabbatical.

What are the odds. I published an opinion post with almost exactly the same title on the same morning:

With all of the GPT talk about "the death of writing", can anyone agree with me that we should not care?. #writing #gpt3 #ai #education #essay #westworld.

תודה לכרמל ווייסמן על אחת השיחות המעניינות שניהלתי לאחרונה על המחקר שלי. אני גם מאד אוהב את הכותרת, ומתכוון לגנוב אותה לכל ההרצאות שלי בנושא!.

Brilliant piece by @michalluria on her work at @CenDemTech on #prototyping for #policymaking.

Especially the category "Surprisingly Eligible" :

If I would ever have to explain this website to anyone outside of the US, they would laugh me in the face

17.5 glorious hours of #robot telepresence - the XPRIZE AVATAR Finals live stream is up: . #robotics #tech.

One of the most interesting and entertaining podcast interviews I've heard in a while. @davekarpf on @techwontsaveus:

Watching the @Meta #metaconnect2022 summary, I am so happy that human civilization has finally (again) reached the point that I tap the side of my glasses, and music will start playing.

The future of robotic telepresence comes down to UX and for the most part the homogenous, engineering-heavy, teams either ignored or "trust-me-im-an-engineer'ed" the interaction. It didn't work for operators and thus for the task. UX design and HRI was the missing ingredient.

Finally, it was depressing to see the lack of diversity in the teams. From what I could see, out of the 17 finalists, a shocking 8 appeared to have all-male teams, with 5 more having a single woman on the team. Sadly, even in 2022, some parts of robotics hasn't changed much.

A team that would have used better hybrid control would have done much better IMHO. If this competition ever repeats, I would guess that there would be a lot of shared autonomy for better remote presence.

One thing that was suspiciously missing was any kind of shared autonomy. Operators did a lot of things "manually" that would have better been handed over to an autonomous subroutine. There was no waypoint navigation or grasping routines.

Operators said that the robot just "did what you wanted them to do", hiding the complexity of robotics behind smart software and a simple interface.