Global Engagement Seminar Speaker Series

The Global Engagement Seminar: Me and My Robot is opening its special lectures to the public for the first time! Join our 2024 Jarislowsky Fellows, leading experts and practitioners in the field, as we explore the social, physical, and practical interfaces between humans and robots and what their presence in our everyday environments will mean for ourselves as individuals and for society more broadly. 

Everyone is welcome - no registration required! 

All lectures are taking place in Engineering 5, Room 3102 and include a talk and Q&A. 

Robots for People Who Know Nothing About Robots

Wednesday, January 31, 7:00-8:30PM

Evan Ackerman is the digital senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, the award-winning flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, Exoticism, Robots, and AI

Wednesday, February 7, 8:00-9:30PM

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at the University of California, Berkeley with secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information, and Radiation Oncology at the UCSF Medical School.

What Thriving Interactive Robotics Could Mean for Our Society

Wednesday, February 14, 7:00-8:30PM

AJung Moon is an experimental roboticist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at McGill University. She investigates how robots and AI systems influence the way people move, behave, and make decisions in order to inform how we can design and deploy such autonomous intelligent systems more responsibly.

Reading Robots

Wednesday, February 28, 7:00-8:30PM 

Amelia DeFalco is a professor of contemporary literature and member of the Medical Humanities Research Group at the University of Leeds. Her work concerns posthuman approaches to care, vulnerability, materiality and touch in contemporary cultural narratives.

Every Moment of Every Day: When Robots Become Environmental

Wednesday, March 6, 7:00-8:30PM

Heather Suzanne Woods is a scholar and researcher of digital rhetoric and the author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right with Leslie Hahner. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Communication Studies at Kansas State University. 

Robots, Regulation, and the Changing Nature of Public Space

Wednesday, March 20, 7:00-8:30PM

Kristen Thomasen is a leading expert in robotics law and policy and an assistant professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC. Her research is focused on the ways automation and robotic technologies in public spaces affect equity, accessibility, and privacy, and how automation and surveillance can introduce privatization into the public sphere.