Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh - Carnegie Mellon University
Professor of Robotics, The Robotics Institute
Director, Community Robotics Education and Technology Empowerment Lab (CREATE Lab)
How will recent developments in technology change our lives – and practice – by the dawn of the next decade?
Robotics is undergoing a major transformation, and this transformation, in turn, will change how robotic technologies apply to education and engage learners of all ages. Robots aren’t walking, talking humanoids any longer. Now, they crawl through riverbeds and measure water pollution; they correlate asthma attacks with particulate matter in the air; they capture high-resolution imagery of archeology sites and bring the sites right into the middle school classroom. In this talk, I will describe the convergence of robotics, Big Data, and community empowerment: how it’s shaping a new discourse regarding the role of education in directing community change, and the role of communities in directing the future of technology innovation. We will describe key trends in technology that will be on-line in the next decade, explaining how new affordances in the 2020’s will affect the practice of education and home-school integration.
Robot Futures contemplates what might happen in the not-so-distant future as robots become both ubiquitous and highly capable – with superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. How we will share our world with these creatures, and how could our society change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings?
Illah R. Nourbakhsh is Professor of Robotics, Director of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab and Associate Director for robotics faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research projects explore community-based robotics, including educational and social robotics and ways to use robotic technology to empower individuals and communities.