Karen Myers

"I was certainly an anomaly as a woman studying computer science back then. There were almost no women in my courses, and I never had a female professor — both as an undergraduate and graduate student. As an undergraduate, it was hard to connect with my fellow CS students."

"One of my early projects involved building a task planner for Flakey, the successor robot to Shakey. A fun highlight related to that effort was when Alan Alda, the actor and host of the show Scientific American Frontiers"

"One area that excites me is neuro-symbolic AI, which combines data-driven machine learning with traditional AI methods that encode pre-defined knowledge as symbolic rules."

"This hybrid design enables human expertise to help guide and influence machine learning. This technology has been used for drug design, where insights provided by a medicinal chemist on desired properties for a new molecule can complement properties extracted from collected data on different molecules."

"A major focus at SRI has been creating AI technologies designed to complement human problem solving."

"I’m hoping some of the excitement about what we’re doing with AI today will attract many more young women to the field."