Invited Talks

Dr. Howard has been at the forefront of AI and robotics for most of her career. At 27, Dr. Ayanna Howard was hired by NASA to lead a team designing a robot for future Mars exploration missions that could “think like a human and adapt to change.” Her accomplishments since then include being named as one of Business Insider’s most powerful women engineers in the world and as one of Forbes’ U.S. Top 50 Women in Tech. She finds that there is both hope and fear regarding the advancements of physical AI (i.e. robots) - will they be our closest partners, or a threat to our jobs, safety, and well-being? In this talk inspired by her new book “Rebooting the Machines,” Dr. Howard will delve into the impacts AI and robotics will have on our society and what responsibility technologists have for mitigating its disruption. She will focus on physical AI as an element in the future of work and explain the critical importance of ensuring inclusion at all stages of development so intelligent systems are designed to be accessible to all.

For a technology that is set to revolutionize our society, AI has been receiving a lot of pushback - from protests on the streets of India to the booing of AI CEOs on college commencement stages in the United States. AI data centers have become a central part of this resistance which, in some cases, has escalated, with anti-AI activists throwing acid on a data centre in Amsterdam and vandalizing an AI research institute in Montreal. Numerous jurisdictions, from cities like San Francisco to states like New York, have temporarily halted the construction of data centers as they grapple with citizen pushback, permitting and strain on local resources and energy grids. In my talk, I’ll explore why AI data centers have received so much opposition, what we know about their impacts on local communities, energy grids and the environment, and how we can collectively work to make them better.