Women Engineers From The United States

"Reach out to teachers and school counselors who can connect you to science and engineering camps."

"If having access to instruments impacts other students as it did me, kids would have more opportunities to engage with a broader group of people and to gain greater understanding of the world."

"I spent my formative years on the Choctaw Indian reservation in Philadelphia, Mississpi, and in Missoula, Montana, where I loved playing outdoors, watching farm animals, and observing everything around me. I believe living in these settings motivated me to explore and respect nature."

"In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us."

"For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being"

"If superintelligent machines are not conscious, either because it’s impossible or because they aren’t designed to be, we could be in trouble."

"The development of AI is driven by market forces and the defense industry—billions of dollars are now pouring into constructing smart household assistants, robot supersoldiers, and supercomputers that mimic the workings of the human brain."

"Mentally tease apart the threads that keep you connected to your mother. See that those threads, those feelings, that you experience with her are what find the two of you -- but they do not have to weave the tapestry of your entire life."

"Kurzweil and other transhumanists contend that we are fast approaching a “technological singularity,” a point at which AI far surpasses human intelligence and is capable of solving problems we weren’t able to solve before, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature."

"For if we are not careful, we may experience one or more perverse realizations of AI technology—situations in which AI fails to make life easier but instead leads to our own suffering or demise, or to the exploitation of other conscious beings"

"According to a recent survey, for instance, the most-cited AI researchers expect AI to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” within a 50 percent probability by 2050, and within a 90 percent probability by 2070.”"

"And if an AI is a conscious being, forcing it to serve us would be akin to slavery"

"Nature is medicine for the soul, Miss Rolston"

"The mother needs mothering too"

"Anything she says will be ok with him -- this she feels instinctively. She looks up and meets his eyes: eagle against the sky, his eyes boring into her. He leans over and kisses her, first lightly, then his arms circles her waist and his hand grasps a shoulder blade, pulling her up and closer. Inside her a diamond, the glittering spot where her feelings have solidified into the hardest substance on earth, catches fire and melts"

"Well, that’s a different story. When I moved to Penn there was nothing, and so I had to build everything from scratch. My first master student, Adam Snyder, was an electrical engineer, and he and I built the digitizer, because we had to buy these analog cameras – camera, one camera – and then build a digitizer. And then I got some NSF initial grants that allowed me to buy a raster display so that we can visualize. The department had PDP-11, so I was working on that computer, and, as I said, it had just a very small memory, and so we were swapping things back and forth. I started to work on – I basically wanted to continue my Ph.D. work, and one of the first things that I started to look at was texture gradient and how can you interpret the three-dimensional information from the two-dimensional projection of the texture gradient. So that was the first Ph.D. with Larry Lieberman, right, was my first Ph.D. student, who then went to IBM research and worked on – had a group in robotics, because I was always interested in the three-dimensional interpretation of the visual information from the very beginning, and I always was interested in vision for, not just vision per se but what is vision for. I thought that it was a good way of testing your algorithms, if you can find the interpretation where you are or can you grasp things or move around? I mean, the robotics gives you a very good testing of your sensory processing, so that’s what I focused on. And then I think it was maybe ’73 or ’74 a man by name Britton Chance, who just passed away yesterday, 97 years old, who was a very prominent biophysicist, he invited me to look at some of these X-ray images from rat brains, because they were really interested in automating the image processing of these medical images. So he brought me into this group, and I found it very interesting, and so that started my career in medical image processing. I worked with him or for him for about six months, but then he was a very strong personality and my joke was you worked for him or you didn’t, and so I quit because I didn’t want to work for him. But then I continued with other people in the medical school at Penn on medical image processing, and I did some nice work there."

"Well, the first robotics system was when I got money to purchase a PUMA robot, which was one of the first robots available for academic labs. And around ’76, ’77, I started to connect the manipulation with the camera work, and grasping was one of the – and of course in those days they had only two-finger grasping, so I initiated with the Penn mechanical-engineering department to design a three-fingered robot, and so we were very much ahead of time in this regard. Around that time I also connected with a French laboratory in Toulouse, which had a rubber sensitive pressure sensor, and as part of the collaboration they made me what we called a “French finger,” which had sensors, so we were able to do this kind of a tactile connection. And so one of my first Ph.D. students – well, he wasn’t my first, but I don’t know, third or so. I think it was third or fourth. Peter Allen, who’s a professor now in Columbia University, he did the first work of this interaction of tactile and visual information, and so that was that."

"With the three-fingered hand? This was – well, I forget the name of the professor in the mechanical-engineering department. He passed away too. I kind of outlive all of my collaborators, but I think the student who designed it was Abramson, if I remember, three-fingered hand with a palm, and then we put some tactile pressure sensors on that, so that allow us to find where you are connecting. And actually, Ken Goldberg, who is here a professor, did his master degree with me on using these tactile sensors for recognition purposes. So, I also during that time connected with psychologists, who were prominent in this tactile perception. One of them was Susan Letterman, who is an outstanding professor-scientist in tactile perception at Queens University in Canada. And then she connected me with another professor, Roberta Klatzky, who is a professor at CMU in the psychology department, and we had a very fruitful collaboration. I learned quite a bit from these two people on how people perceive that – for example, people have certain procedures, motoric procedures when they want to find out how hard something is or what is the surface texture, and so there are these modules that people – procedures that people use for exploring. They called it “exploratory procedures.”"

"Well, in those days there were no CCD cameras, so it was a regular camera like yours and then attached was a digitizer, which provided you digital images, and then you worked offline on these digital images. And the challenge there was that first of all the memory in computers were very small. We worked on small images, so the resolution was not very good, worked on 64 by 64 pixels or at best 128 by 128 pixels, so the resolution was rough, and in texture you really need a higher resolution in order to capture the local properties, so that was a challenge. Technology just wasn’t there. Everything had to be made in the lab. We had to build digitizers and deal with swapping the memory to disk all the time, because the memory was typically 64K or so or even – then later on I worked on PDP-11, which had a 32K memory, the cache, so it was very different time, and therefore the approaches you took were quite different than today people use millions of pictures and do statistical analysis, very different."

"Well, no. There are many other changes. I mean, of course the speed and the memory size of the computer is phenomenally different, I mean, but the parallel isn’t that the distributed computing is also tremendously big difference and the display systems. At that time we used – when I worked at Stanford we didn’t have even a raster display. It was all just vector displays that displayed only the contours. At the end of my stay at Stanford we got the first raster display, which allowed you to display all the pixels, but in the beginning it was all just displaying contours."

"It was amazing beautiful seeing the earth from that vantage point," Epps said. "But for me, one of the big things is that now I want to see trees, I want to see people, I want to touch things and experience things here on Earth more than I did before. And it's just made me appreciate things I think just a little bit more and the simple things, not the big things but the simple things in life that make me happy."

"Even just the weight of your head and trying to hold it up and some of the muscle pains that you'll have because you haven't held your head up in what eight months almost for us"

"Yes, I was academically inclined. I was the good student. I raised my hand a lot. I got good grades, and I tended to be very much engaged with my teachers. I tended to know my teachers very well."

"I think they need to pursue their dreams," Epps said. "You may not make it to space, but will you make it way further than if you had never pursued that dream."

"I figured that I’d become a great scientist and then maybe, maybe, maybe in the future I’ll be able to apply, if I establish myself well enough"

"I’m still in awe of seeing the Earth from the vantage point we had from the Dragon vehicle as we were approaching the International Space Station, You can see it in pictures, you can even dream about those pictures, but there’s just something that happens when you see it with your own eyes."

"My greatest challenge is climbing the ladder of success, and pulling others behind me," she said. "If you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post, you know he had help getting there"

"I think it's important to get started as soon as you can. In one sense, I decided I wanted to get a doctorate when I was 5 years old, but I didn't know that I wanted to be a professor until many years later."

"I tell my students to hone their communication skills, both oral and written. It's no secret that we engineers and scientists are often guilty of being poor communicators, but being able to communicate, especially to the general public, is essential. I love that show "Big Bang Theory," but we're not all that bad! The other thing needed is imagination. You must be willing to step into the unknown because in STEM you won't be hired to solve problems for which the answers are already known."

"This downward spiral is especially severe for girls of color, girls with disabilities, girls living in poverty and girls who are learning English as a new language, The United States cannot afford to lose more than half of its talent and the fresh perspective that women and minorities can bring to these critical fields. We must work together across the boundaries of skin color and gender."

"That's right. That's right. They were scientists involved in public health. And for that reason, I always was encouraged to explore science, math, as well as all of the broader fields of social and physical sciences."

"When most people think of a professor they think "teacher," and that is true. However, my work entails the two other "pillars of professorship"--research and service. On any given day, my research involves everything from grant writing, to presenting experimental results at conferences, to guiding students through their own masters and PhD programs."

"Once my mom told a shop owner I was going to college next year. He laughed and asked if I wanted an "Mrs. degree". Even as a teenager, I was ticked off! There are people who can't fathom women in STEM—especially women of color. Oftentimes as the only African-American and/or female in situations, I STILL run into those subtle doubts or even insults at times. However, I've found that a tough skin, a determined mind, and a prayerful heart can take you through any challenge and to any goal."

"Read, read, read, and learn, learn, learn."

"Communication is paramount to your success, You need to articulate how your great idea is impactful, whether to your community, society or economy. Having strong technical skills is critical, but you must also be able to work with others and communicate effectively to bring those ideas to life."

"It just looks otherworldly to me … like, what you would see if you were on the moon."

"Earning a PhD from Northwestern was an important milestone in my life. I once stood where you now stand. I know how hard you have worked to get where you are today, and I am impressed by your accomplishments."

"I share my story because it’s important that you understand me and the value I place on learning and formal education"

"I once stood where you now stand. I know how hard you have worked to get where you are today, and I am impressed by your accomplishments."

"I poured these feelings which have been stewing slowly for years into the regimen of restraint I needed to lose ten pounds in 7 weeks. Even this I feared wouldn’t be enough for me to be a viable competitor, but it was all I could reasonably do."

"I grudgingly accepted my unspoken duty to my mom to do this thing that continues to be a significant part of my life for better or worse. She unpacked and furnished my house while I concentrated on adjusting to working remotely for my job I kept from Boston. I employed what felt like grueling levels of self-discipline to prepare for the pageant. After all, I had moved here to pursue business opportunities in pageantry, and wouldn’t the title of Miss Colorado USA be a great foot in the door?"

"The discipline naturally spilled over into my work and I had a productive start to my entirely separate and equally significant remote work journey. My boyfriend was with me for it all and offered his observations and insights about all the newness in our lives."

"For my science project, I studied how quickly different foods would mold when placed in various locations. At one point, we had stinky, moldy food all over the house. That’s love"

"Usually, anticipation is a slow burn, but when you’re on stage in heels, under the bright lights, smiling nervously ahead waiting for the emcee to say your name, the anticipation burns hot and fast."

"People just sometimes see what they want. They put their own filters on and choose to like or dislike you based on whatever they think. What I did was just worked really hard and proved them wrong."

"No matter how many times I go through it, I can’t help but feel its intensity which then mellows into ambivalence, leaving me in a stupor of more emotions than I can count."

"The first one is a favorite is because when I was young, I got to see man go to the Moon."

"Yes, there weren’t any African American women studying aerospace/mechanical like me. There weren’t any at my university, which was a historically Black college. I could have said that I felt out of sorts but because I played sports most of my life and I played with boys, I didn’t really feel so out of place."

"I first realized I had an aptitude for Math and Science during my high school years at Marine Park JHS, where I was the only Black student enrolled in the Special Progress program. In my senior year of JHS, I won second place in the Science Fair and scored in the 90s on all my Regents and citywide exams."

"My academic career now combines all this to try and understand the expression patterns of these cell surface receptors in cardiovascular disease."