All Quotes

"The skies opened,I realized that this is what I had been looking for all of my life."

"Imprecise language and buzzwords govern the computing ecosystem. I coined the term HTC in the mid-nineties in order to differentiate it from traditional High Performance Computing, known to many as supercomputers."

"It is a great honour to receive the LEO award, and I humbly would like to accept this on behalf of the South African information systems community. I would also like to acknowledge all who have made it possible for me to achieve my objectives during my academic career: my family - in particular, Annemarie, my dear wife of 45 years, my South African academic colleagues, and, especially, my students."

"One reason I am at IBM is its commitment to leverage advanced technology and continue to push the innovation envelope to deliver value to the industry and benefit for clients..”"

"Fundamentally, the way we think about it is that we decompose the computation that's in the robot's head now into two parts. The first part is in charge of taking the sequence, the history of actions and observations, and trying to synthesize them into some representation of a belief for a probability distribution about the way the world might be and then another module that takes that belief and decides how to behave."

"To be a good leader you have to be an entrepreneurial thinker – anticipating and adapting to enable new capabilities that deliver higher value to users"

"So the dimensionality of the space is kind of unthinkably high. It's also not exactly clear what constitutes an object here. If you were going to behave in this world, it would be a very long sequence of primitive actions that you would take in order to clean this kitchen. And also there's just a fundamental amount of uncertainty in this problem, right? So you don't know what's in the blue bowl or what will happen if you try to pull out a certain thing. You don't know when the people are coming home or what they want for dinner all sorts of stuff you don't know."

"And so any approach that works effectively in a domain like this is going to have to handle very large spaces, very long horizons, and really lots of uncertainty. So we have kind of a standard structural decomposition to this problem. We call this belief space hierarchical planning in the now. I'll decode what that means a little bit."

"If their marriage is not working or they have an issue with their sexuality, they feel so down trodden and nothing."

"“I am always thinking about different uses for technology. One of the things that attracted me to IBM was its commitment to pushing the innovation envelope. What I find really inspiring are the endless possibilities innovation presents to leverage technology for the benefit of humankind, giving hope that we can meet pressing global challenges of providing nutrition and healthcare to everyone, or urgently addressing pollution, global warming and climate change for example.”"

"“I find it’s important to lead by example. I work to ensure my team develops a combination of trusting their own vision and approach, and is able to articulate and execute their decisions. That is the pattern I try to follow. I try to role model the qualities I expect in others. I try to communicate to my teams that my expectations from them are no different than the expectations from myself. If my teams see me practicing those values and demonstrating those when working across different divisions as well as with clients, that will help foster empowerment, collaboration and encourage inclusiveness"

"Being inclusive is very important to me. I work to ensure that people feel included and are in jobs that leverage their strengths. It’s important to know yourself as a whole person, and play to your strengths: that way you will build your confidence and at the same time advance your skills and talents"

"I believe in accountability: if something goes wrong, I take responsibility, look to find a resolution and learn from the experience. Mistakes and failure are important elements of growth"

"These are best practices, not because we say so but because they prove successful from generation to generation of technology.”"

"We’ve got to be aware, we’ve got to educate ourselves, and we’ve got to let go of the stigma and the shame that adults feel about mental health that we then impose on our young adults so that they begin to feel bad about any challenge to their psychological well-being."

"We need to get to a place where we can say, “It’s ok when you’re not ok.""

"We’re going to focus on the children we believe can be diverted from the system, either through a referral from law enforcement at the point of contact in the community, a referral from a school resource officer, a self-referral from a family member or a community organization that works with children who recognize some of the signs of at-risk behavior in that child,"

"Our basic job is to protect the hope of others,” she says. “We have to be hopeful they will get better or they won’t be."

"We now understand more clearly that these are not just “bad kids.” Most enter the system for reasons other than the delinquent act with which they are charged."

"So this is the interesting part, is the robots at the time were mostly hydraulic robots. Very large robot, heavy robots. There was a robot from Renault that I think it was called the R80. Huge. Eighty kilograms it can carry. And I really didn’t implement my approach on that robot, but I used this cable-driven robot called the MA23 manipulator that was designed and developed by Jean Vertut. Jean Vertut is probably the father of robotics, robot design, in France. And there is a number of very, very influential people in my early career in robotics, and Jean Vertut was one of them. Jean Vertut developed most of the concept that led to cable-driven actuation. The three-fingered hand Kenneth Salisbury developed was based on a lot of those concepts. Many of the robots that were later developed were based on ideas and concepts that Jean Vertut developed. Jean Vertut passed away very quickly years back, and the whole robotics field missed him. But I had this privilege to know him. And also the privilege of having my paper selected by him, my first paper, to be then – the introduction to me to know Professor Roth, who eventually invited me too to come to Stanford."

"So I became involved during these years in one of the early project in robotics called Spartacus. Spartacus is a project to develop a robotic system that is aimed to assist human. And in this project a number of research groups around France, from the South to the North, in were involved in that pioneering project. I think this was probably one of the earliest project in Europe. And it brought a number of people who are still today involved in robotics. So if we go over the group of people who is today involved in robotics we will find many of them who participated in that project. However, my research itself was very closely connected with another laboratory in France. Because of my work was pursued at the school SUPAERO. Next to SUPAERO there is a very important center of robotics, and this is called LAAS, L-A-A-S. And at LAAS, there was a very important project initiated and led by Georges Giralt. And Georges Giralt was in fact one of my other mentors. In fact, he was the director of my post-doctoral study. He was the chair of the committee of my defense, and with Georges we had a long, long years of interaction, sharing a lot of the ideas that in fact became part of my own research or the research that has been pursued over the years at LAAS. Georges Giralt was leading the robotics research effort at LAAS, and one of the researchers there is Mark Runeau. Mark Runeau was one of my very close colleague, because both of us, we were interested in dynamics. And Mark Runeau, together with Wisama Khalil from Montpellier, were also, the three of us, we were working in different aspect of dynamics. In fact, Wisama and Runeau developed software to generate automatically, symbolically, the dynamic equation of robots, that in fact I used myself in developing some of the dynamic models. But my approach to dynamics, as I said, was based on the idea that we need to understand dynamics at the level of the task. Not just at the level of the joints. So I was doing this transformation and I had a great partner with Mark Runeau for discussion. And Mark Runeau was very close to me in Toulouse. And we shared a lot of moment of discussion on dynamics."

"Yeah. It is really, to say, that we get a lot of inspiration from the human. But we are not trying to just record human motion and replay the motion. What we are trying to do is to really to understand what is behind this motion, what is the strategy, and how can we encode that strategy in something that the robot can use as a strategy so we can generalize? But this is, again, part of the whole approach. We are seeking solution that can address a versatile number of problems. We’re not just looking for finding or engineering the solution to a specific problem. Because robotics is about ultimately all kind of task in all kind of environment, and we really need to look at this versatility."

"Surgeons deserve all the necessary resources to do the work we love. As passionate as we were in 2022, the ACS will be even more vocal in 2023 in advocating and lobbying for fair and equitable funding for our profession, and we will propose new ways to assess the value of a surgeon that reflect our contributions to the healthcare system."

"Graduating was not just my accomplishment but ours."

"So arriving to Stanford, it was wonderful. We had the AI lab in Margaret Jacks. In the basement of Margaret Jacks, next to the DEC-20. We had a small room with one table and four robots. The AI lab just moved from the hills down to Stanford to the basement of Margaret Jacks. At that time, there were a number of, I mean, extraordinary people that were involved in the AI lab. The AI lab attracted a lot of talent in robotics over the years. Just behind me you can see the Vic Scheinman robot, the Stanford Scheinman arm robot. There were a number of people who were involved in the ‘70s in the AI lab. In the ‘80s when I arrived, we had John Craig was there. Tom Binford was leading the AI lab. My friend, the very famous researcher in both AI and robotics, Rodney Brooks, was there. In fact, many other people came through as visitors. We had also a very famous designer, Ken Salisbury, who was there. There were a number of people from the field of vision. There was Harlan Baker. I don’t want to go over all the names. I have the list and I have their photos. If you would like, we will look at that later. But it was an amazing dynamic environment that I’ve never experienced in my life. It was just the discovery of that exciting place that made me decide to stay one more year and one more year. Then Stanford just kept me forever, because it is very, very difficult to leave this environment. The research environment, the excitement, the opportunities to take on a new project, is really unique. What is interesting also is the fact that while I was at Stanford, I was in France as well, collaborating with my colleagues. I was in fact involved with other collaborations in Japan. In the year ’84, ’83, and in fact December ’83, I visited Japan for the first time, and I had the great, great opportunity of meeting Professor Inoue, Professor Umetani, Hirose, Professor Nakamura, who was a student at the time. And his advisor, Professor Hanafusa, and Professor Yoshikawa, and also a number of, I mean, just pioneers in robotics. All of that was done during one trip I had to Japan in 1983. Since then I kept in touch with all these different laboratories over the years, and that was really an amazing experience. What I discovered about Stanford and about the AI lab is the fact that what we are doing is so much connected to the world, and that became one of the other dimension for my research."

"Well, this is really interesting, an interesting question. Looking back at my Ph.D. where I started, looking at the vision I had in that work, I feel like I’m still working on my Ph.D. That is from the beginning, I took on a challenge, which is to try to understand the robot system with respect to descriptions of the task. That is, to try to not just worry about modeling the physical robot in a convenient space, which is essentially the joint space. I was interested in understanding the characteristics of the robot when it’s interacting at a given point with the environment. What would be the effective masses that I will feel here when I’m going to touch the environment? What is the normal space in which I can exert forces and what would be the corresponding tangent space where I can move? A lot of questions related to the dynamics and the control of robots in task space have not been really fully addressed. There are few people around the world who really look at those problem. Neville Hogan thought about it in the context of analyzing human motion and proposed very interesting models using impedance control. There are a number of other researchers who looked at those problems, but synthesis in task space has not been something that a lot of work was done in, and that was really one of the things that I was committed to pursue and to work on. So there was that work that was taking me from thinking about how, “Can we control just one effector?” Then how can we go from one effector that is not only moving in free space, but obviously interacting with the environment? But then how can we go from one robot end effector to two end effectors? How can we do comparative manipulation when we start to have internal forces? Then how can we have general cooperation between multiple robots? Then how can we make this robot mobile manipulators? Just behind me you can see Romeo and on this side you have Juliet. These are the two platforms that we developed to explore the workspace of a human. That is, we always thought about these manipulators attached to a table and bringing the component to be assembled by those robots."

"Now, if we are really to think about robots that would interact with human or move in the human environment, we would need to have those robots not fixed but mobile. So we started to look at mobile manipulation, and that brings a lot of interesting issues in the dynamic of macro mini-structures. The properties of dynamics in relation to reduce effective inertias, redundancy, and all kind of things that were amazingly interesting to analyze and work on. As we pursued this work, we discovered that, “Well, there’s more.” When we got to humanoid robotics we have the branching, complex branching structure, with multiple tasks that need to be simultaneously achieved while maintaining constraints, while maintaining balance, given the fact that these robots are under-actuated. It’s amazing. You have one problem after the other. It’s so rich, so exciting. So that was one line of the work that I was really interested in, dynamic control and control structures."

"But there was as, you know, from the beginning I was interested also in the aspect of interaction with the environment through understanding of obstacles and the need to avoid collision and the need to create motions around those obstacles. So having resolved the problem in term of reactivity doesn’t mean that we resolved the global problem. Because motion planning requires us to think about a global path. Now, if we think about the computational complexity of this, we realize that this is exponential in the number of degrees of freedom and it is costly to find a path, to plan a path, especially for a robot with many degrees of freedom. I was always interested in finding a way to connect those planning levels, that is the level where we are planning the motion with the levels of execution where those levels are running at very high frequencies. If we think about the control, we need to have a millisecond of control , whereas if we think about a motion planner, well, between the time we find the obstacles and perceive the environment to the time we come up with the new plan, it’s going to take long time. Especially in the ‘80s. What we really tried to do was to create an intermediate level that would allow us to think about this connection between motion planning and control in a way again similar to that of human. The idea that became known as elastic planning is to start with a plan and continuously adjust this plan reactively. Locally by mechanisms really simple as repulsive potential forces, but the trajectory itself is treated as a physical entity with property of elasticity that will make it shorten and adjust to the environment and the changes in the environment. That became a very, very interesting technique that also is being pursued by a number of my current student and previous students like Oliver Brock, who worked on this. Sean Quinlan developed the early version of it, and now a number of new students are working on taking this further, not only to move in the free space, but also to think about the contact space."

"Right. I mean, the whole idea that really is pursued here is human. I mean, if we think about human, human never go through this exercise of precisely planning every aspect of their motion. We do not compute a full trajectory or a full plan. What we do is like we are sitting here, and after the interview you’re going to go back to the parking. You’re not going to plan all the details of that motion. What you know is you need to go to a door and you know that it’s going to be feasible to go to the door. Probably you have some intermediate landmark along the way. So we plan with this concept of feasible, reachable locations, and along the way we know that we are going to accommodate our motion using our reactive behavior. We are interacting with the world as we are moving. In your car you are driving around other cars and people and bicycles. It wasn’t completely in the plan. But you know that skill is there. Ee make use of skills, and what we do when we are interacting with the physical world, when we are making contact, when we are assembling objects, when we are putting things together. We are also using skills. When we are playing tennis, when we are doing any challenging task, we are using skills. So the idea is let’s then plan – first of all, let’s develop those skills for the robot. That is, skills are a more abstract, a more advanced capability for the robot than the simple control of following a trajectory or reaching a point or just touching a surface. It is a skill to say, “I’m able to accomplish this task, taking into account different things.” By building those skills, the planner can plan using those skills. So the task of planning becomes much less difficult and complex, and in real-time, the skills can perform at much faster servo rate than any dependency, full dependency, on the planner that would be required if we didn’t have the skills. So all the challenge is, “How can we teach these robots those skills?” This is what we are doing. We are making use of a lot of fundamental characteristics of those robots in term of their kinematics, dynamic models, so that we build the first layer and then we abstract that layer to create a behavior that can accomplish a different task in the environment with obstacles, with a object. So we talk about compliant motion behaviors that allow the robot, for instance, to move to a multi-contact with the environment by just detecting and feeling those contacts. You can imagine a task of just putting a lid on a box. This is something really hard, if we want to do it just by controlling the motion and the position, but actually this is something that becomes very easy if we understand compliant motion. So this becomes a skill that then could be used and reused in different situation."

"What will help you thrive are your relationships with the people who love and support you, who, without exception, want what is best for you,"

"It was a crashing disappointment The interesting parts weren’t rigorous, and the rigorous parts weren’t interesting."

"We AI researchers are concerned about the potential impact of artificially intelligent systems on humanity. In the first half of this essay, I argue that ethics is an evolved body of cultural knowledge that (among other things) encourages individual behavior that promotes the welfare of the society (which in turn promotes the welfare of its individual members). The causal paths involved suggest that trust and cooperation play key roles in this process. In the second half of the essay, I consider whether the key role of trust exposes our society to existential threats. This possibility arises because decision-making agents (humans, AIs, and others) necessarily rely on simplified models to cope with the unbounded complexity of our physical and social world. By selecting actions to maximize a utility measure, a well-formulated game theory model can be a powerful and valuable tool. However, a poorly-formulated game theory model may be uniquely harmful, in cases where the action it recommends deliberately exploits the vulnerability and violates the trust of cooperative partners. Widespread use of such models can erode the overall levels of trust in the society. Cooperation is reduced, resources are constrained, and there is less ability to meet challenges or take advantage of opportunities. Loss of trust will affect humanity’s ability to respond to existential threats such as climate change."

"All of our research is dedicated toward the same practical goal,Namely, we aim to be able to predict and understand using computational tools why catalysts or materials behave the way they do so that we can overcome limitations in present understanding or existing materials"

"Once you realize the sheer scale of how many materials we could or should be studying to solve outstanding problems, you realize the only way to make a dent is to do things at a larger and faster scale that has ever been done before,”"

"Thanks to both machine-learning models and heterogeneous computing that has accelerated first-principles modeling, we are now able to start asking and answering questions that we could never have addressed before"

"While I wanted to be useful, I kept being drawn to these fundamental questions of how knowing where the atoms and electrons were located explained the world around us,Ultimately, I obtained my PhD in computational materials science to become a scientist who works with electrons every day for that reason. Since what I do hardly ever feels like a chore, I now have a greater appreciation for the fact that this path allowed me to ‘not have a real job.’”"

"We can each see and learn from different problem-solving strategies others in the group have tried and help each other out along the way.”"

"I reflect on what I’ve been doing at work as well as what my priorities might be both in life and in work in the upcoming year, This helps to inform any decisions I make about how to prioritize my time and efforts each year and helps me to make sure I’ve put everything in perspective."

"I was born in 1968 and grew up in and around St. Louis, USA. My loving parents were often overwhelmed because I asked them questions continuously to the point of exhaustion. As a child I was inspired by the space age, with Kubrick and Clarke's 2001 exciting me with dreams of a future full of space exploration and intelligent machines (HAL 9000). No one in my family had gone to college, and nearly everyone around me was skeptical about higher education (why would you let them "educate the brains out of you?" or "After that, he ain't got no more common sense."). This made it seem nearly impossible to get on track for helping build that envisioned future. Also, while I was growing up, the space age was slowly disintegrating."

"In the early 1980s, I spent much of my spare time in video arcades and on the Atari 2600 home console. It blew my mind when I heard that a kid up the street had a computer and it could be used to "program his own" video games. I quickly read a book and started programming regularly on a display TI 99/4A at Kmart. I couldn't believe that I could make this machine do whatever I wanted! Eventually, I scrounged up enough money to get the cheapest home computer (TS 1000 with 2k memory), and when I turned 16, I worked lousy food service jobs all summer to buy a Commodore 64. This allowed me write all kinds of programs, both in BASIC and machine language, with my favorite still being to make video games. At the same time, this activity, along with some inspiring teachers, gave me enough confidence to go from being a terrible student in high school to being the top student in every subject. This required a huge amount of work and determination. I think this made me not very popular among some people who came from more educated and wealthy families."

"Near the end of high school, I still believed that engineers mostly drive locomotives, but my guidance counselor pointed out that with my interests in math, science, and computers, I should probably be an electrical or computer engineer. He then showed me a college guide to convince me that some school in Missouri was one of the "top" (it wasn't listed there), and I looked over his shoulder and saw the top 3 schools listed as "MIT", "Stanford", and "Illinois". He didn't seem to know anything about "Illinois", but I made it my mission to learn about it. I figured that MIT and Stanford were only for rich people from another planet, but Illinois happened to be the name of that state on the other side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis. I soon realized that "Illinois" was UIUC, which was actually the home of the fictional HAL 9000 Computer from 2001! It was to be completed in 1992 (movie) or 1997 (book), which meant I had a chance to help realize at least part of the glorious future of that movie. It took me a couple of years of complicated scheming to borrow money in every way possible to cover the triple out-of-state tuition rate. When I finally figured it out, I had to personally petition to UIUC Engineering Dean to even be allowed to apply as an out-of-state transfer student, and they said I was the only one they let in over the past decade. Persistence! I then fought for two more years to get all prior credits transferred, and finally graduated as one of the top students from Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1989."

"What I’m doing today is anchored in my PhD work in the late 1970s. I always joke that I’ve been working on the same problem for over 40 years and it’s still not done! My thesis was on load balancing and distributed systems."

"You need to hook up with people who have some strength in this area and start walking a deliberate path."

"The reason I included the bits above is to explain why I always have strong empathy for people who have struggled because they are not part of the usual group in power. In my case, it was mostly about coming from a poorer, working-class family. Doing something smart would often lead to bullying. I could feel people having contempt for me as I succeeded and maybe even outperformed them, when based on my way of speaking, clothing, or whatever else, I should have been easily beaten. I really didn't care for competition; I just wanted to ensure I could be in a place where I could work with very smart, open-minded people. I am certain that others who struggle with additional issues based on race, gender, sexuality, disabilities, foreign nationality, and so on, face these problems and more. I had to learn how to speak and act differently to fit into the higher levels of society, but to this day I continue to have feelings of impostor syndrome. If you know what I am talking about, then please be sympathetic and support each other (and not only the ones in your own group)!"

"Around 2012, I started to get the sense that robotics as a field was gradually becoming less interested in fundamental research, and many researchers were insisting that all work should be experimental and practical. Based on my background described above, I have tended to be respectful and supportive to all communities, which made this trend disheartening. On the other hand, I thought that if one was to do something very practical, then why not just build a product in industry? Otherwise, I could not see the point of being in academia. So, I gave it at try..."

"In September 2012, I got an email out of the blue from Jack McCauley, from a VR company that was founded two months earlier by a 19-year-old named Palmer Luckey. Oculus VR had just closed a successful Kickstarter campaign and needed to make head tracking work for the Oculus Rift in a hurry. Jack was googling for things like "quaternions" and "Euler angles" and found my Planning Algorithms book. I was just about to refer them to some industry-oriented colleagues, but contemplated my family financial worries, including paying for my eventual children's university tuition, retirement funds, and rising medical costs. I naively thought a successful startup could fix that. Before too long, I was their chief scientist, where I developed patented tracking technology for consumer virtual reality, and led a team of perceptual psychologists to provide principled approaches to virtual reality system calibration, health and safety, and the design of comfortable user experiences. By March 2014, Facebook agreed to buy the company for $3 billion. I guess I was lucky in my first industry experience! The overall story is nicely told in this book by Blake Harris."

"The unbelievable Oculus success also opened many doors, and I had the opportunity to get to know people I never would have met before, including CEOs, venture capitalists, serial entrepreneurs, billionaires, politicians, and Hollywood people. At the same time, I returned to UIUC to continue my tenured position. I was so excited about the consumer VR revolution that I started a new course and wrote a VR book based on it. The key insight was that understanding human perception and physiology is critical to engineering of VR systems and experiences. Thus, the course and book provide a unique integration of these subjects. A version of the course was recorded by NPTEL when I visited IIT Madras in 2015 and is available online."

"In 2016, I was approached by Huawei to be their Chief Scientist and Vice President for VR/AR/MR consumer products. I proposed building a big research center, in the UIUC Research Park, which would be a joint effort between the University of Illinois and Huawei. Both parties were excited, and after a year of preparation, I joined Huawei while retaining a part-time UIUC position. Like many US universities, UIUC had taken in many thousands of high-paying Chinese students in recent years (presumably to help with rising costs and the lack of tax funding). These students were absolutely shocked and thrilled that I was leading this effort, bridging the gaps between China and the US. Needless to say this was eventually doomed in 2017 amid rising nationalism, the eventual US-China trade war, and Huawei being put on the entity list. I nevertheless had a wonderful time working in Huawei and learned so much about consumer product development. I met many hard working, kind, and intellectually interesting people, and thoroughly enjoyed the culture in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hangzhou."

"After the industry experiences, I could see startling differences between the academic and business worlds. I was most comfortable in universities, where I was able to freely learn, grow, and openly share whatever I know with people around me. In industry, information is protected, which leads to complicated games and strategies for gaining power based on who knows what. It is a difficult place to be if you enjoy sharing your knowledge and understanding, and generally helping people with their projects. I also found the Dunning-Kruger effect to cause serious problems in industry, especially when people don't know what they don't know, but have massive power over others and company directions. Both worlds clearly play important roles, but I learned that a university research environment makes me the happiest. I feel very lucky to have been able to try both at fairly high levels."

"One "occupational hazard" of being a professor is exposure to various countries, cultures, and people from all over the world. I was very fortunate to visit a few dozen countries, often hosted by people who have the same professional interests. This made me wonder what my life would be like if I had grown up there. I became attracted to Poland, where I have family heritage, and then Nordic countries. I was especially attached to Finland after teaching a short course at the University of Vaasa in 2007; I was invited by Pekka Isto, a Finnish motion planning expert."