On her first day at NASA in 1999, Dr. Ayanna Howard walked into the Telerobotics Research and Applications Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, excited to begin programming Mars rovers with her newly assigned staff. But a male staff member barely registered her presence, saying “The secretaries work down the hall.” So began the rise of one of the few female African American roboticists in America.
To be fair, Dr. Howard’s staffer probably didn't realize that the young woman entering the lab was his boss because he had never met a female robotics Ph.D. Even today, although 74 percent of girls are interested in technology-related fields such as computer science, as adults they represent only 25 percent of all computing occupations. As if that isn’t low enough, women leave the tech industry at twice the rate men do.
“The only thing that’s saved me is that I was stubborn,” says Dr. Howard. “I credit my upbringing with giving me confidence, although even then that wasn’t enough.”
Her mom was a computer scientist and her dad was an engineer. Exposure to tech-related fields is key for a child to later succeed in technology, as studies such as The Equality of Opportunity Project’s “Who Becomes an Inventor in America: The Importance of Exposure to Innovation” reveal. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it,” affirms Howard.
A 1970’s TV character, half woman half robot, was another role model for Dr. Howard. She saw the possibility of a woman using bionics—mechanical and electronic systems that mimic biological ones—to do good in the world. And so, inspired by real life as well as entertainment role models, Dr. Howard set her course for a career in robotics.
Growing up in Pasadena, California, Dr. Howard didn’t realize she could be labeled by her appearance. It wasn’t until college that she discovered racism in the classroom when she and the only other two minority women in the class had their grades cut unfairly. Yet, she persisted, achieving her B.S. from Brown University, M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and her M.B.A. from the Drucker School of Management at Claremont University.
Shows like HBO’s Westworld provide a new generation of young women with the kind of characters that inspired Dr. Howard. In the show, robots Delores and Maeve learn to drop their subservient programming in order to take charge of their lives and induce others—including powerful men—to follow them. Asked how she did it, Dolores responds, “I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel.”
Dr. Howard is also changing socially constructed narratives—such as who gets to be the boss in robotics. She was 27 years old when she took charge of the NASA team developing artificial intelligence for Mars rovers. Almost 20 years later, she’s now the Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and the chief technology officer of Zyrobotics, a company she co-founded in 2013 to build educational products for children.
For the past two years Dr. Howard has been studying bias in robotics, inspired by previous studies that reveal bias in artificial intelligence (AI). For example, an investigation led by MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini and partner Timnit Gebru, on facial-analysis programs from major tech companies, uncovered skin-type and gender biases. The AIs only had a 0.8 error rate when analyzing light-skinned men and up to a 34 percent error rate when analyzing dark-skinned women. Implicit racism and sexism such as this led Dr. Howard to question how much the field of robotics is affected.
In Dr. Howard’s 2017 paper in The Science and Engineering Ethics Journal, “The Ugly Truth About Ourselves and Our Robot Creations: The Problem of Bias and Social Inequality,” she points out that the biases of the world at large appear to have crept into artificial intelligence. “Intelligent though they may be, these algorithms maintain some of the same biases that permeate society. They find patterns within datasets that reflect implicit biases and, in so doing, emphasize and reinforce these biases as global truth.”
The solution? Dr. Howard says roboticists and programmers need a data set that mirrors the US Census Report. Meaning if 22.8 percent of the population is below 18 and the data set doesn’t reflect that, it’s a problem. What happens, for example, if a self-driving car isn’t programmed to identify children?
Even in not-so-smart-machines, like the original crash test dummies, which were modeled for fifty years after a 6-foot, 180-pound man, unintended biases can be detrimental. The lack of crash test dummies modeled after woman led to women being under-protected during accidents. Now, asks Dr. Howard, if robots are programmed with bias, could these machines act in unpredictable ways?
“You design out of your own experience—it’s what makes us human,” Dr. Howard says. Therefore, it’s crucial to have diversity in robotics. “Diversity is all of the parameters that make your experience different,” she says. “And a lot of these systems are biased because the [engineering] teams are fairly homogeneous.”
The question is, how to bring a broader range of perspectives into a field that has been dominated by white men? Dr. Howard’s very presence helps the cause, showing females and minorities that robotics is in fact accessible to them. But more is needed.
Conscious of her own early influences, Dr. Howard also believes in starting early to inspire young people. That’s the mission of Zyrobotics. The company brings robots to schools and into the home to educate children with physical, mental and emotional disabilities. But instead of focusing on diagnoses and labels, Zyrobotics uses robots to give children the opportunity to solve problems in ways that are intuitive to them rather than pushing an educational model. In other words, the technology adapts to the needs of the individual, rather than forcing the individual to adapt to the technology.
“They’re learning and they’re provided access to thinking logically,” Dr. Howard says of the children. “A child who’s given the tools,” may not become an engineer or computer scientist, “but if they think like one, they can start solving their own problems. Which means that they can start understanding how to advocate for themselves when they need something.” There’s no telling where that can go, especially since Dr. Howard’s work is helping to put children with disabilities on more level footing with their peers.
Ultimately, Dr. Howard’s work contributes to people being seen as people, in robotics as well as anywhere else. She’d like everyone to experience what she did back in high school, where her label came from who she was inside: “the smart kid.” She laughs, “I’m so glad I got that label. Because I had no clue, that was just the label I had.”
Discover the real-life Westworld here.
