ACM Athena Lecturer Award

Award page

Ayanna Howard is this year’s winner of the ACM Athena Lecturer Award. She works in robotics and is Dean of Engineering at Ohio State. She was previously Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.

Today Ken and I congratulate her and also recognize past winners of the award.

The award is not for lecturing. Here is the description:

Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer gives an invited talk at a major ACM conference of her choice.

Howard’s Research

Ayanna Howard’s research spans three interconnected areas of robotics:

• Outer Space Robotics: She did early work for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Here is a 2002 article that leads with her work on the “Safe Navigation Rover.”

• Inner Space Robotics: This work involves interaction and assistive technologies. It includes her co-founding the company Zyrobotics, which creates mobile therapy and educational technology tools for children.

• Inner Mindspace Robotics: On what grounds can we trust robots? How can they be programmed to avoid biases in their interactions with human beings? Can the algorithms they use be certified for fairness? (We had some recent thoughts of our own on the last subject.)

There are technical connections that flow from a whole-situation/whole-person approach. Her NASA landing and navigation systems were not designed simply to solve a computer-vision and calculus problem of finding the flattest terrain. Instead, the design expressly maps visual and sensor readings into a knowledge and logic-based system of human reasoning. Then the system either judges or makes recommendations to human controllers. This kind of approach naturally flows into assessing the robotic judgments for blind spots and bias. Most in particular, she tries to combat a human tendency of uncritical acceptance of personal assistants. She wants to facilitate humans to challenge the robots and have the robots modulate their reasoning and behavior accordingly.

She was inspired as a child by the TV show The Bionic Woman. Adding “-nic” after “bio” took what could have been influence to go into medicine into an avenue that channeled her childhood love of mathematics.

A Puzzle

I designed a word-search puzzle by feeding terms from the award to a web app for creating them. We wondered if it was silly to include it. But maybe the puzzle is not so silly—besides that it was created by a ‘bot—if you think in these terms:

How might a robot get the most out of solving it?

Here is the grid—see if you can find the words in it. The key is at the end.

From a human standpoint, three minutes is award level. But for a robot:

• Of course, a robot could solve the puzzle in three microseconds by brute-force string matching along every row, column, and diagonal. But there is no challenge in that—it is not what we think of as human reading.

• To be human fun, the puzzle should be fairly dense and have a “wordscape” where parallel rows, columns, and diagonals are used. Once we find one word, we can often find neighbors more quickly, and that feels rewarding.

That’s what we’re asking: is there a way to teach robots to solve these puzzles in more human ways? OK, it’s too simple. But we like to put a peg down on a simple example, then run a line into the heart of the work, and ask: at what point does it cross the threshold of being nontrivial?

All Athena Winners

Here are links to all the winners of this award:

2021 Ayanna Howard

2020 Sarit Kraus

2019 Elisa Bertino

2018 Andrea Goldsmith

2017 Lydia Kavraki

2016 Jennifer Rexford

2015 Jennifer Widom

2014 Susan Dumais

2013 Katherine Yelick

2012 Nancy Lynch

2011 Judith Olson

2010 Mary Jane Irwin

2009 Susan Eggers

2008 Shafi Goldwasser

2007 Karen Sparck-Jones

2006 Deborah Estrin

Open Problems

Lynch and Goldwasser are the only theory researchers. This is less than .

The puzzle key: