Educators From The United States

"Throughout cognition, there are instances where we seem to know more than we have any reasonable right to know about the world, where we arrive at generalizations that go far beyond our sparse, noisy, limited experience. How are inductive leaps possible? There must be some other knowledge in our heads, some more abstract knowledge that guides and constrains our inferences"

"Human common sense involves the understanding of physical objects, intentional agents and their interactionsHuman common sense involves the understanding of physical objects, intentional agents and their interactions"

"I take a constructivist approach to understanding. When I study something, I ask “How could I build this, or how can I build things with this?” This is opposed to, for example, “Where might I observe this in nature?” I also tend to ask right away,"

"I came to Carnegie Mellon in 1978 as a graduate student. The robotics institute started in 1979. I was here from the beginning, but I did not do robotics then."

"I designed a hexapod robot called the Chiara (see photo), which some students of mine have used to do really cool things. One programmed two Chiaras to play chess on a real chessboard. Another got a Chiara to walk up to an electronic keyboard and play Ode to Joy."

"I am slowly trying to learn quantum mechanics. Right now I’m reading Noson Yanofsky and Mirco Mannucci’s Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists, and Manjit Kumar’s Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. Both are excellent books."

"One interesting experience I had as a computer scientist occurred when the Motion Picture Association filed a lawsuit to suppress publication of computer code for decrypting DVD movies."

"How do we use computation models to reverse-engineer intuitive theories and teach an AI to evolve based on these principals?"

"That’s right. I, my motivation was really coming from seeing that something does work, the brain, and understanding more about how the brain works would be necessary to understand thought consciousness or what have you."

"In a good physics problem, you have a system which is well defined and where you can understand something about how collectively it may work in a way which is more robust than the individual little bits and pieces. You don’t leap into a problem overall saying, I want to understand how mind works."

"I don’t think there’s another physicist in the town of Selborne, so that things slowly leak out over the news. But there’s no marching in the street here."

"It was built to partly prove theorems, which is one of the jobs that AI does. [inaudible word] emission, theorem proving, and so forth."

"Partly, but partly to see how far we could go with automating the proof of mathematical theorems. That was the intent."

"You have to build up from the bottom. If you were doing weather, you would say, well, I want to understand what storms are without going back to interacting air nitrogen molecules."

"I’m still somewhat in shock"

"You get a very special purpose prover that uses heuristics, then they stop at the boundary where they can't work anymore."

"Heuristics are ad hoc. They tend [correct word?], you fix up the heuristics for limit theorems. Now when you go to algebra you need some new heuristics. And when you go to functional analysis and you need some new ones. When are you going to stop? This is what we want as a general purpose prover here. It will prove anything. You're in a dilemma. I mean if you get a general purpose prover oftentimes they're too weak."

"I don't think it's too hard in any particular area, although I think people are a little surprised how easy it was in limit theorems. I don't think the average person would do it."

"Yes, that's fair enough. It's not really what I said, though. I mean my goals were independent of the name. I wouldn't call them mathematics either."

"Incidentally my goal wasn't to necessarily press forth AI. It was out of these asides, but AI was used to prove theorems early on. Jerome Simon had one of the first provers that I considered a good AI. Imply was supposed to do the same kind of thing. It was suppose to be an interactive prover and a stand-alone prover at the same time."

"We proved — in the stand-alone mode with heuristics — we proved limit theorems of calculus and that's a good sample"

"And that it somehow was related to collective phenomena in networks. And I slowly wove my way from an interest in how the brain functioned to a question of how could hardware or software, or whatever you want to call it, wetware, produce such a thing."

"You have to build up from the bottom."

"And the centre of gravity of my knowledge and understanding moved slowly from much more physics oriented to the neurobiological one. And somewhere along the line, this connection between AI, networks, neural networks and physics developed."

"No, other AI people who weren't working on theorem provers in particular. I don't know if I can give a lot of references off the top of my head, but that was the state of the art for awhile. It used heuristics and that turned out to be later not as popular amongst the formal automated theorem proving crowd to use heuristics. They wanted to find out what you could do to stand alone heuristics."

"I have devoted my entire life to increasing the number of highly qualified African Americans in mathematics and mathematics-related careers. High expectations, building self-confidence, and the creation of a nurturing environment have been essential components for the success of these students. They have fully justified my beliefs. Perhaps the most rewarding moments have come when younger faculty have undertaken the same goal and have surpassed my efforts reaching out to the broader community to help minorities and women achieve in mathematics"

"Can you imagine what it was like for a 19 year old Black female from Tupelo, Missippi who had been immersed in segregation for all her life to attend the University of Wisconsin? I underwent a major culture shock. ... I gravitated to students from Africa, a roomate from Thailand, and an office-mate from India, who was the only person to whom I could ask a mathematics question."

"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."

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

"I was used to kind of being the only girl a lot. I probably did better than most in terms of the cultural shock and not having other women around, but I had to deal with some prejudice as people doubted my capabilities. So, there are always challenges and I don’t think it just being about the color of your skin or your gender."

"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."

"I graduated with high honors and passed the exams for all of New York's Technical High Schools but instead of attending those schools, I moved to Cambridge, Mass., to live with my grandparents and attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston."

"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."

"That singular experience is why you are able to have this conversation with me today. The level of confidence that she had in making that proclamation that I could be an engineer was enough to carry me through. I went from that horribly failed exam to getting an A in the class."

"I was resistant to the notion of mentors for a long time, and part of that was probably me being defensive in the sense that people don’t randomly come up to folks like me and nominate us. For a long time, I didn’t get opportunities to interact with mentors in the way you might traditionally describe, but I did have interesting experiences."

"There’s an interesting journey to my research. The class that I was struggling with at the undergraduate level was fluid flow. That is one of the core courses in chemical engineering, and I remember leaving it going, “God, thank you and good riddance.”"

"You must have confidence in yourself, and for me my spiritual grounding was very important, knowing that God loves me as much as he loves anybody else and that He’ll fight battles I can’t. I’m not in a room to fight. I just believe in myself, and I believe in Him. Some of the groups I was a part of at MIT never had a woman or an African American before."

"You have to know it’s your calling because it’s not easy in this area particularly when most of the people around you don’t look like you. You will run into hostility. There will be people who think you should not be there, and I had my share of experiences like that."

"It’s a little bit embarrassing, but real in the sense that there was no deliberate move towards engineering. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, engineering was often a profession reserved for men and women were steered toward careers in healthcare and medicine."

"That really got me excited about graduate school and I was attracted to the lab of Dan Hammer, who was interested in understanding how white blood cells — especially neutrophils, which take up pathogens — interact during the body’s inflammation response. I spent my graduate school days trying to understand how to create particles, artificial cells, that could mimic this behavior."

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

"I became interested in noise problems while attending a workshop at NSF. People from various companies discussed issues with deploying speech technology over VOIP and dealing with everyday noise."

"We’re going to keep innovating and seeing how we can fill a void that’s out there involving speech and sound.” — Carol Espy-Wilson, founder and CTO of OmniSpeech"

"Because of my training at MIT where we focused on understanding what’s unique about speech and understanding how it is produced. I could use my knowledge to deal with removing noise to help improve voice communications."

"The first time I remember being fascinated by space was when I read about how the solar system formed. The fact that it was formed from a giant cloud of gas and dust spewed out by supernovas and it all came together under gravity and made the Sun and all the planets – I thought it was bananas that scientists could figure all that out based on what they can see today. I remember thinking, “That’s really cool that we can know that about space.”"

"Like, how you get there, how you deal with the radiation, how you power a spacecraft so far from the Sun. This talk will give people a peek into some of the interesting things that have happened along the way and hopefully plant a little seed of excitement that they can nurture over the next five years to get ready for all the science data that this mission is planning to send back."

"The things I do on a day-to-day basis change over the course of the life cycle of a mission. Early on, you’re involved in the requirements and rules the design has to follow so you can meet your mission goals. So you work with people at all the different levels to develop the requirements and make sure all those rules are written properly. Then systems engineers are involved with verifying those requirements and developing tests and sitting in on the tests."

"Many engineers treat speech like it’s any other signal when it is not. As a professor, I had a couple of Ph.D. students who did dissertations in this area, and I had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard for a year where I could put all of it together into a solution."

"We each have a solemn duty to make positive contributions to the world. Well, my reasons for becoming an engineer were initially frivolous, but they eventually moved into something more meaningful. I want to have a positive impact on the world."