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Fall 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Julie Shah, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Effective Human-Machine Partnerships in High Stakes Settings”
November 3, 2023 at 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
This is a HYRBID event with a VIRTUAL SPEAKER. The GRASP on Robotics Seminar will be streamed for in-person attendees in Wu and Chen and virtual attendees may join the talk via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
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. In this talk I share the Situational Awareness Framework for Explainable AI (SAFE-AI), and discuss the ways in which traditional XAI methods can promote or undermine human situation awareness. I also share our lab’s latest research in employing the framework to effectively blend the unique decision-making strengths of humans and LLM- and RL-enabled machines.
Julie Shah
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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, she 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. She 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).