MIT Technology Review’s: 35 Innovators under 35
Visionaries: By looking at things a bit differently from everyone else, they find powerful new uses of technology
“To build better machines, a roboticist goes far outside her field for guidance.
Nora Ayanian calls robots people. It’s not some weird affectation; it helps her with her work.
She’s a computer scientist who thinks machines should work together to get things done. Let’s say a farmer wants to have drones autonomously survey crops and take soil samples. You couldn’t program each drone with the same set of commands, because each would have a different task and would have to solve different problems as it navigated. You know what is good at solving problems on the fly, in a group that draws on various skills from different individuals? People…”
– By Ryan Bradley
– Photo by Damon Casarez
Featured People
PhD, MEAM '11 - Associate Professor of Computer Science and Andrew and Erna Viterbi Career Chair, University of Southern California