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Julie Shah    

Department Head of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, Director of the Interactive Robotics Group

Julie Shah is the H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, faculty director of MIT's Industrial Performance Center, and director of the Interactive Robotics Group, which aims to imagine the future of work by designing collaborative robot teammates that enhance human capability. She is expanding the use of human cognitive models for artificial intelligence and has translated her work to manufacturing assembly lines, healthcare applications, transportation and defense.

Before joining the faculty, Shah worked at Boeing Research and Technology on robotics applications for aerospace manufacturing. Prof. Shah has been recognized by the National Science Foundation with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award and by MIT Technology Review on its 35 Innovators Under 35 list. She was also the recipient of the 2018 IEEE RAS Academic Early Career Award for contributions to human-robot collaboration and transition of results to real world application. She has received international recognition in the form of best paper awards and nominations from the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, and the International Symposium on Robotics.

Shah has earned degrees in aeronautics and astronautics and in autonomous systems from MIT and is co-author of the book, "What to Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration" (Basic Books, 2020).

Speech Topics

Engineering Intelligent Machine Teammates

We’ve heard both sides of the debate, from those claiming robots can help us to others saying they’ll lead to our own demise. But what if the conversation didn’t rely on this “us versus them” binary? How could, for example, people and robots work together as a team to solve problems? The collaboration between people and robots can be improved upon, but the first step is moving away from making this an either/or choice. To do this, we need to be more comfortable with the machines we’d work with – we need to trust that they’ll do the right thing. We need build better machines that can reverse engineer the human mind, understand our behavior, and jump in seamlessly as a team member to shore up our weaknesses.

Positive Sum Automation: A Smarter Strategy for Using Robots

Every team has top performers -- people who excel at working in a team to find the right solutions in complex, difficult situations. These top performers include nurses who run hospital floors, emergency response teams, air traffic controllers, and factory line supervisors. While they may outperform the most sophisticated optimization and scheduling algorithms, they cannot often tell us how they do it. Similarly, even when a machine can do the job better than most of us, it can’t explain how. The result is often an either/or choice between human and machine, or else hard trades wherein automation enhances human productivity but sacrifices flexibility - resulting in what we call zero-sum automation. In this talk I present research case studies from industry and discuss the design, implementation and ROI decisions that can realize positive--sum automation, which enables productivity and flexibility.

Human-Machine Partnerships and Work of the Future

More robots joined the U.S. workforce last year than ever before. What does this mean for workers? How do we build better jobs alongside intelligent machines? Our aim is to realize a future in which dramatic advances in automation and computation can go hand in hand with improved opportunities and economic security for workers. When engineers develop a new software tool or piece of equipment, we make decisions that have downstream consequences for workers. In manufacturing, for example, how much skill it requires to program a machine might affect the types of workers that can interact with the technology – and the wages they can demand. In this talk, I discuss what decision points are key for workers in a product development process, and how engineering research can incorporate worker context and worker consequences into the technology development process.

News

Innovators Under 35 | Computer & electronics hardware - Julie Shah
This MIT engineering professor is turning robots into ideal colleagues for humans.
Julie Shah named head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
An expert in robotics and AI, Shah succeeds Steven Barrett at AeroAstro.

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