The Trailblazing Roboticist Tackling Diversity and Bias in Artificial Intelligence

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.