Ayanna howard, roboticist, ACM Athena Lecturer, and dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering, is optimistic about the ability of robots to help people. She understands the challenges that must be addressed for that to happen, and has worked throughout her career not just to advance the technical state of the art, but to quantify and overcome issues including trust and bias in artificial intelligence (AI). Here, she talks about self-driving cars, accessible coding, and how to incorporate different perspectives into hardware and software design. The pandemic heightened public interest in robots--suddenly, we all want robot cleaners and robot grocery deliverers and so on. How is that impacting the robotics community?

How did you learn to talk? Probably something like this: Your infant brain, a hotbed of neurological activity, picked up on your parents' speech tones and facial expressions. You started to mimic their sounds, interpret their emotions and identify relatives from strangers. And one day, about a year into life, you pointed and started saying a few meaningful words with slobbery glee. But many children, particularly those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, acquire language in different ways.

How did you learn to talk? Probably something like this: Your infant brain, a hotbed of neurological activity, picked up on your parents' speech tones and facial expressions. You started to mimic their sounds, interpret their emotions and identify relatives from strangers. And one day, about a year into life, you pointed and started saying a few meaningful words with slobbery glee. But many children, particularly those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, acquire language in different ways.

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.

In all the Singularity-based angst over whether robots are going to take over, few have considered the human qualities that might allow our silicon cousins to prevail. Specifically, will robots dupe us into doing something dumb or dangerous because we trust them too much? PCMag discussed this recently with robotics expert Dr. Ayanna Howard after her keynote at the first IEEE Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) conference. Howard spent 12 years at NASA JPL as a Senior Robotics Researcher but is now the founder and CTO of Zyrobotics, which creates advanced technology to assist children living with disabilities. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.