Engineer says robotics can use a woman’s touch
A recent Women’s eNews article profiled Robin Murphy, director of the U.S.A.’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. In the article, she says that rescue robotics, and the overall field of artificial intelligence, “requires a woman’s touch, a better sensitivity, to really put people first in designing rescue robots.”
The center had only been in existence for 10 days before it was called into action following the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center buildings. That experience greatly influenced Robin’s continued work on rescue robots and her belief in the importance of women in the fields of science and engineering.
In the U.S., the robotics industry is worth $5 billion, yet women make up less than 25 per cent of graduate students in engineering and computer sciences.
Read more from Women’s eNews.
As an engineer myself, I found this really interesting, particularly the idea of doing more research around the way robots relate to, or interact with, people.
The idea of women’s superior relationship skills being brought to this type of interaction is also interesting, but I don’t want to get controversial, so I’ll leave it at that (and mull a few things over myself). :)