“Fearless Girl should provide the spark to inspire more female engineers”, writes Elizabeth Croft, Dean and Faculty of Engineering at Monash University.
“Girls are natural engineers, highly capable in maths and physics. We need to show them that these tools can be used to design a better world.So far, we’ve done a poor job of communicating to girls the very powerful impact they can make through an engineering career.” Croft continues, providing us with the inspiration to introduce the second of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Elizabeth Croft, Helen Greiner and Heather Knight from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013.
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Elizabeth Croft
Dean and Faculty of Engineering at Monash University
Elizabeth Croft (featured 2013) is now a Dean and Faculty of Engineering division at Monash University in Australia, advancing human-robot interaction, industrial robotics, trajectory generation and diversity in STEM. Previously she was the Founding Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As the Marshall Bauder Professor in Engineering Economics, Business and Management Training from 2015-2017, she launched the Master of Engineering Leadership degrees at the UBC. Recognized as one of the 100 most powerful women in Canada in 2014 by Women’s Executive Network, Croft also received the RA McLachlan Peak Career Award for Professional Engineering in the Province of British Columbia, Canada in 2018. She is a fellow of the ASME, Engineers Australia, Engineers Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is also the recipient of other awards such as the Wendy MacDonald Award, Diversity Champion, Vancouver Board of Trade of 2016, and Just Desserts Award of University British Columbia, Alma Mater Society in 2015. She has more than 200 research publications and almost 6000 citations. She is an advocate for women in Engineering and has an exceptional record of propelling women’s representation and participation in engineering. As the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (2010-2015), she worked with partners in funding agencies, industry, academe, and the education system on comprehensive strategies to improve women’s participation and retention in the STEM disciplines at all levels. During this period Croft successfully increased female enrollment in Engineering to 30%. |
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Helen Greiner
CEO, Cofounder and Founder of Tertill, iRobot and Cyphy Works
Helen Greiner (featured in 2013), is now a founder of Tertill , in addition to founding iRobot and CyPhy Works (aka Aria Insights). Tertill is a solar-powered, weed-snipping robot for home gardens patrolling throughout the day and looks somewhat like an outdoor Roomba, one of the products from iRobot, the world’s first commercially successful consumer robotics product. Greiner has received numerous awards and accolades, including being named an “Innovator for the Next Century” by Technology Review Magazine. She received the DEMO God Award at the DEMO Conference in 2014 and was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Leadership (PAGE) by US President, Barack Obama and US Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker. She was recognized for leadership in the design, development, and application of practical robots by the National Academy of Engineering, and was named “woman of the year” at Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2018. In 2018, she was also sworn in as a Highly Qualified Expert for the US Army. You can hear her speak in 2021 at the finals of the $2m GoFly competition . As a child Greiner became fascinated by the robots of StarWars, particularly the three-foot-tall spunky R2D2. Says Greiner “He had moods, emotions, and dare I say, his own agenda. This was exciting to me—he was a creature, an artificial creature.” Consistently pioneering in building the helping robots to perform dull, dirty and dangerous jobs and launching robotics into the consumer market since 2008, she says, “If we don’t take robots to the next level, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do to our grandchildren.” |
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Heather Knight
Assistant Professor at Oregon State University
Heather Knight, (featured 2013) is now an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Oregon State University and directs the CHARISMA* Research Lab. In CHARISMA Research Lab, she operationalizes methods for the performing arts to make more emotive and engaging robots, exploring minimal social robots, robot ethics, charismatic machines, and multi-robot/multi-human social interaction. Knight has presented a TED talk: Silicon-Based Comedy in 2010 where she demonstrated a robot stand-up comedian “Data” which has gotten almost 1 million views. She was mentioned in Forbes List’s 30 under 30 in Science and named one of AdWeek’s top 100 creatives in 2017. In 2017, she was also a Robotic Artist in Residence at X, the Moonshot Factory. Her installations have been featured at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, TED, Pop! Tech, LACMA, SIGGRAPH, and the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, Italy. She is also the Assistant Director of Robotics at Humanity+ and a fellow at the Hybrid Realities Institute and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow. She is also a founder of Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company performing comedy, dance and even Rube Goldberg Machine installations. Here, she successfully organizes the annual ‘Robot Film Festival’ which awards Botskers to various robot films and robot film stars. The film archives make for great viewing. |
Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!
And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org
European Robotics Week 2020 (ERW2020) began on Thursday and hundreds of interactive robotics events for the public have been announced. These will take place in countries across Europe and beyond, to show how robots will impact the way we work, live, and learn.
In a year when humanity has faced a global pandemic crisis, robotics companies and researchers across Europe have been able to demonstrate how robotics help societies and economies to keep operating in a world affected by Covid-19.
With the opportunities arising from Europe’s digital transformation driven by new technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing and blockchain, the demand for ICT specialists continues to grow. In the future, 9 out of 10 jobs will require digital skills (source). Yet fewer women than men take up ICT-related jobs and education: for every 1000 women, only 24 graduate in digital fields (source). European Robotics Week (ERW) promotes digital skills for everyone to be used everywhere, be it in school, at university or on the job, putting the emphasis on inspiring girls to follow STEM-related careers.
What is happening in Europe?
Since 2011, European Robotics Week has been encouraging robotics researchers, universities and industry to open their doors to the public to raise awareness of the contribution that robots can make to our society. In 2020, despite the limitations imposed on physical events by restrictions to tackle the spread of Covid, organisers have been resourceful in arranging hundreds of activities throughout European and and beyond.
See the full list of activities: www.robotics-week.eu
ERW Central Event 23-25 November, Sarajevo, Bosnia (BiH) ONLINE
Every year the ERW chooses a location to host the Central Event, with an opening ceremony and an eco-system of various engaging activities. This year’s Central Opening event is hosted in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzigovina, during 23-25 November. The ERW2020 Central Event will be delivered entirely digitally, meaning that a great many people both within BiH and beyond, including children, will be able to interact with ERW2020’s online fair, workshops, webinars and lectures and competitions.
Under the theme Robotics for Humanity, the Central Event of ERW2020 in Bosnia and Herzegovina will focus on the positive effects of robotics and technology on everyday life, economy and health, especially taking into account challenges arising from global COVID-19 pandemic and technology’s potential to address them.
The event will also mark the 10th anniversary of European Robotics Week and it will coincide with the European Researchers’ Night celebrated on 27 November. It will be run by the Association for promotion of culture, science and cinematography BALKANFILM and the Info Centre of European Union to Bosnia and Herzigovina.
ERW was conceived with the desire of the European Robotics community to bring robotics research and development closer to the public and to build the future Robotics Society. Many more than 550,000 people across Europe have been part of ERW since its first edition in 2011. The European Robotics Week is organised under SPARC, the public-private partnership for robotics between euRobotics and the European Commission.
European Robotics Week 2020 (ERW2020) takes place across Europe and beyond during 19-29 November 2020.
The 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) has teamed up with Black in Robotics (website, Twitter) to release a new special series named BiR-IROS: Black in Robotics with the support of Toyota Research Institute. This series consists of three short but powerful videos of roboticists giving personal examples of why diversity matters in robotics, showcasing their research and explaining what got them into robotics.
BiR-IROS: Black in Robotics is available for free through the OnDemand platform until 25 November (located under Technical Talks or at this link). Here’s a list of all the speakers and organisations who took part in the videos: