Ken Goldberg

Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Our Fear and Fascination with Robots

Engineers, animators, and designers apply the concept of the Uncanny Valley to technologies from AI to Robots to Siri. In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay tracing the concept of the Uncanny back to the Renaissance. Goldberg illustrates this history with art that explores the shifting borders between the digital and the natural, including his Emmy-nominated short doc film that explores our collective fear and fascination with robots, the most human of our machines.

Brainstorming At a Global Scale

To brainstorm at the scale of social media, we can use techniques from an unlikely source: Robotics. Goldberg presents recent results on social innovation and collective brainstorming work with the U.S. State Department, General Motors, and the State of California.

Putting the "Turing" into ManufacTuring: Recent Developments in Algorithmic Automation

Automation for manufacturing today is where computer technology was in the early 1960's, a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions lacking a rigorous scientific methodology. CAD provides detailed models of part geometry. What's missing is formal models of part behavior and frameworks for the systematic design of automated systems that can feed, assemble, and inspect parts. "Algorithmic Automation" introduces abstractions that allow the functionality of automation to be designed independent of the underlying implementation and can provide the foundation for formal specification and analysis, algorithmic design, and consistency checking.

Too Close for Comfort?: AI, 5G, IoT, Robots, and Privacy

Prof. Goldberg will present recent advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and networking and the potential dangers they raise in terms of security and privacy. Goldberg will illustrate these issues in the context of advances in audio, video/face recognition, and data surveillance, including from his own research on robot learning, Freud's concept of the Uncanny, and art projects including his Whitney Museum art installation and the concept of "Respectful Cameras".