The program aims to train tomorrow’s roboticists in the positive and negative implications of their creations.
The University of Texas (UT) recently announced the development of a new ethics-focused robotics program for graduate students. The five-year curriculum will prioritize understanding how robotics and the accompanying artificial intelligence (AI) impact society negatively and positively. In particular, the program will focus on understanding how the development of robotics could infringe on privacy and further economic inequity.
“In the next 10 years, we are going to live more closely alongside robots, and we want to be sure that those robots are fair, inclusive and free from bias,” explained Junfeng Jiao, associate professor in the School of Architecture and the program lead, in a news release. “And because the robots we create are reflections of ourselves, it is imperative that technologists receive an excellent ethics education. We want our students to work directly with companies to create practices and technologies that are equitable and fair.”
The program, called CREATE (Convergent, Responsible and Ethical AI Training Experience for Roboticists), is a collaboration between the UT robotics department, industry partners and the UT grand challenge research initiative into Good Systems. The focus of the Good Systems initiative is to establish an ethical framework to develop, evaluate, implement and regulate AI-based technologies. Within robotics, the ethical focus is in the area of fairness, interpretability and ethics of deployed AI systems.
The Good Systems program was recently awarded a $3 million grant through the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship Program. The grant will help to support 32 doctoral students receive coursework, mentorship, professional development, internships, research and public service opportunities.
Students enrolled in the CREATE program will learn how to design service robots within an ethical framework. They will learn how to build robots that can work in factories and clean homes, with all the technical challenges those environments bring. But the designs will also factor in ethical issues, such as privacy and inclusivity. The program will cross many departments at UT including computer science, architecture, engineering, information and public affairs.
In line with the program’s focus on inclusion, more than half of the program’s trainees will be selected from underrepresented groups in STEM education. This focus will help to increase the diversity of the field of robotics. Towards this end, students will also receive mentorship from faculty in career development, writing grants and networking opportunities with local startup companies. In addition, several robotics companies, such as Sony AI, Bosch, Amazon, SparkCognition and Apptronik, said they will offer students internships at their companies.
However, even students not selected for the CREATE program can benefit from the new program’s existence. The coursework component, comprised of five courses, will be available to all STEM graduate students at UT Austin.
“This program will enable us to educate well-rounded roboticists who are not only grounded in the technical details of designing and building autonomous robots, but who are also equipped to fully consider the societal implications of their work,” says Peter Stone, director of Texas Robotics. “That is a missing part in robotics education in the U.S. and the world. We believe this is a game changer for the future of robotics.”
