ECCV 2020 Daily - Wednesday

Alyssa Pierson is a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology CSAIL, working with Professor Daniela Rus in the distributed robotics lab. Starting next January, she'll be moving over toBostonUniversityandgettingher assistant professorship in mechanical engineering. Alyssa, you have studied many different subjects. What are you working on now? In the past three years, I've been working on different problems related to autonomous driving. More specifically, I like to explore how we can encode trust and cooperation into these systems: how do we design systems that are robust to different types of interactions; both interactions between different types of robots as well as interactions of understanding, for an autonomous vehicle, and understanding the human drivers in the system. Why do you like it? I think it's a really interesting problem to look at how different robots need to interact. And I think that these interactions are crucial to bringing robotics into our everyday lives. Can you tell us about today’s robots? I think a lot of the traditional ways we think about robots, we separate how the robots operate from humans in the environment. As we have [now] greater capacity for the robots to perceive and sense their environment, as well as greater computational power - better brains within the robot - we can really make them safe to operate in and 2 Women in Computer Vision 24 DAILY W e d n e s d a y “… what I think is also really powerful is that if we design a good safety system, we can kind of prevent these ‘oh no!’ moments from happening!”