Women Scientists From The United States

"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"

"Nature is medicine for the soul, Miss Rolston"

"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 mother needs mothering too"

"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 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"

"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 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"

"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."

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

"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.”"

"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."

"It is really, really wonderful to have you all here in person on this beautiful – I hardly ever get to say this in Ithaca – this beautiful sunny day."

"Because, of course, the event was virtual,” . “It was me and two camera people. And that’s it. Rows of empty bleachers. And I’ve got to tell you, even if it’s hot, it is so much nicer to be here with all of you."

"These are two pieces of advice that go right to the heart of who we are at Cornell, right to the heart of how we’ve kept our community together and moving forward during this extraordinary era."

"Knowledge gives us a compass, But kindness is what gets us down the road. And to quote an African proverb that one of my mentors was fond of sharing, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."

"It’s almost like each individual fish acts like a distributed sensor, Instead of me doing all the work, somebody on the left can say, ‘Hey, I saw something.’ When the group divides the labor so that some of us look out for predators while the rest of us eat, it costs less in terms of energy and resources than trying to eat and look out for predators all by yourself."

"“What’s really interesting about large insect colonies and fish schools is that they do really complicated things in a decentralized way, whereas people have a tendency to build hierarchies as soon as we have to work together, “There is a cost to that, and if we try to do that with that with robots, we replicate the whole management structure and cost of a hierarchy.”"

"When you think of an ant, there is not a concentrated set of neurons there,referring to the ant’s 20-microgram brain. “Instead, there is a huge amount of awareness in the body itself. I may wonder how an ant solves a problem, but I have to realize that somehow having a physical body full of sensors makes that easier. We do not really understand how to think about that still.”"

"It’s almost like each individual fish acts like a distributed sensor. Instead of me doing all the work, somebody on the left can say, ‘Hey, I saw something.’ When the group divides the labor so that some of us look out for predators while the rest of us eat, it costs less in terms of energy and resources"

"The other factor is that Amazon’s robots do a mix of centralized and decentralized decision-making, The robots plan their own paths, but they also use the cloud to know more. That lets us ask: Is it better to know everything about all your neighbors all the time? Or is it better to only know about the neighbors that are closer to you?”"

"“As far as we know, there isn’t a blueprint or an a priori distribution between who’s doing the building and who is not. We know the queen does not set the agenda,” . “These colonies start with hundreds of termites and expand their structure as they grow.”"

"James is the one that got me into robot swarms by introducing me to all the things that ant and termite colonies do,” Nagpal said. “I got excited about how nature makes these complicated, distributed, mobile networks. James was developing that used similar principles to move around and work together. Those multi-robot systems became a new direction of my research."

"“I have no idea how that works, “I mean, how do you create systems that are so adaptive?”"

"The reef was super healthy and colorful, like being in a National Geographic television show,” . “As soon as I put my face in the water, this whole swarm of fish came towards me and then swerved to the right.."

"I got excited about how nature makes these complicated, distributed, mobile networks. Those multi-robot systems became a new direction of my research."

"Instead of having to reason about everybody, your car only has to reason about its five neighbors, I can make the system very large, but each individual’s reasoning space remains constant. That’s a traditional notion of scalable —the amount of processing per vehicle stays constant, but we’re allowed to increase the size of the system.”"

"There are few others [like Amazon] with hundreds of robots moving around safely in a facility space. And the opportunity to work on algorithms in a deployed system was very exciting."

"“Maybe we could do what Amazon is doing, but do it outside, We could have swarms of robots that actually do some sort of practical task. At Amazon, that task is delivery. But given Boston’s snowstorms, I think shoveling the sidewalks would be nice."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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.’”"

"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"

"Leadership can happen in ways large and small. I believe leadership happens more often in small ways in our own personal spheres of influence and in some ways that some people may never see."

"And I hope to be tangible evidence for young girls and young boys and girls from communities of color that you can aspire to be a physician. Not only that, you can aspire to be a leader in organized medicine."

"We face big challenges in health care today, and the decisions we make now will move us forward in a future we help create."

"The saying ‘if you can see it, you can believe it’ is true"

"The only way that I will be in charge of this [lab] group is if you let me run it my way and there’s no interference from anyone."

"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,”"

"I’ve made many mistakes in my time,” she told her lab team. I expect you to make mistakes. I expect you to tell me what those mistakes are so we can correct them."

"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."

"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."

"We are no longer at a place where we can tolerate the disparities that plague communities of color, women, and the LGBTQ community. But we are not yet at a place where health equity is achieved in those communities,"

"We could just try to figure out how humans work because humans work pretty well in a variety of domains. And so one program would be to say, "Well, we forget how humans work. And then that's what we do. We make robots that work like that." So first of all, that's a hard biology problem. I think it's very important that people work on it. But it's also not a general engineering methodology because for instance, I might want robots that work in certain kinds of circumstances or problem domains that are really different from the niche that humans are well tuned for. And so I might want to make a robot that isn't really human-like in its intelligence. And then it seems like what we're left with that maybe we could just say, well, we'll somehow recapitulate evolution. Like we just search around in the space of programs and try to find ones that work well and then eventually get ones that are great for our environment. But that seems slow and complicated."

"So if I enumerate my options and they all don't look very good, I don't know what to do. So one thing to think about, though, is this last thing. So the kind of evolution idea. So let's just pursue this a little bit more. So imagine that we want to try to find a program that works well in expectation over all environments. One way to think about that is that inside the factory, we kind of simulate a bunch of environments. We try a bunch of robot programs. And we try to find one that works well in all those environments. And that's like a really interesting strategy. We would have to think of a space of possible programs for the robot, some objective function. We figure out, well, what are we trying to optimize, a distribution over problems to test."

"In some sense, this is a thing that people have thought about for a long time, right? This would be like running some kind of evolutionary algorithm or some search or simulation inside the factory. And it's very attractive, but I think generally speaking, hard to make work well. So the question is what should I do, right? I could maybe I can set up this whole evolutionary setup somehow. And then I could just snooze for a really long time while some very complicated program tries to figure out the best robot program to put in the head of the robot. But I don't know. I am simultaneously too impatient for that."

"So imagine that you have some kind of probability distribution over the worlds that the robot could actually end up operating in. I want to find a program that's going to behave well, let's say get a lot of reward in expectation on average over all the environments that it could possibly find itself in. So that's, I would say, kind of a reasonable formal objective for a robot. And one thing that's good about this as an objective is that we don't have to argue about it, right? It doesn't say whether there should be learning in there or what kind of learning or should it be a genetic algorithm or should it have planning. In some sense, you could say, "I just want to make the program that's going to be the best that can be on average over these environments.""

"So I imagine that there's some distribution over possible environments that the robot could find itself in when it actually goes out into the world, right? So maybe it's going to go to houses and the houses are all somewhat different. And once I put that program in the house, maybe it's going to do some estimation or learning. It's going to adapt to the circumstances it's in. My job is to find a program that does a good job of adapting in all the environments that might find itself in."