Hi everyone,

Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is Dr. Tom Williams, who's joining us from Colorado School of Mines. His work focuses on natural language-mediated human-robot interaction with consideration of a range of contexts (e.g., environmental, social, moral). It's quite a timely topic alongside the emergence of LLMs/VLMs, and also well aligned with our program's emphasis on robotics and society.

As a reminder, everyone is expected to come to the seminar. We’ve got a strict no-device policy. We also have, as always, coffee and coffee cake.

For the winter term, we're in Rogers Hall 230. Seminar is at 10am Friday. See you then!

Cheers,

Naomi

P.S. If you'd like to catch Dr. Williams' double-header (seminar, as well as moonlighting as a musical improviser), you can also get tickets to the Saturday night Singu-hilarity show at the Majestic Theater. The show usually sells out in advance, so it's best to plan ahead!

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Title: "Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice"

Abstract: Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to curtail scientific research into diversity and inclusion, social justice issues remain of critical importance to key areas of national interest, including robotics and artificial intelligence. In this talk, Tom Williams will explore critical questions surrounding robotics and social justice, especially the ways that roboticists wield power through the ways they design and deploy their robots. In doing so, Williams will highlight not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce White and Patriarchal power structures when they make design and deployment decisions, but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields, including history, sociology, literature, psychology, and philosophy. Ultimately, Williams will connect questions of robot design with larger Abolitionist movements by presenting a vision for an Abolitionist Robotics that calls not just for an end to unjust paradigms of robot design, but moreover for active work toward a more social just future of robotics.

Bio: Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017. Tom’s research focuses on enabling and understanding natural language based human-robot interaction that is sensitive to environmental, cognitive, social, and moral context. His work is funded in part by Early Career grants from NSF, NASA, and the US Air Force. He is the author of the forthcoming book Degrees of Freedom whose central themes will be summarized in this talk.