Wong Auditorium

This conference will showcase research from leading minds at MIT, as well as highlight examples of robots deployed in industry. It will also serve to emphasize that robotics is not a special field separate from computing, but rather that robots are the leading instance of a merging between the digital and physical worlds — and of computing becoming physical.

Computing Becomes Physical … As we develop more and more systems that interact with the physical world, manufacturers, software developers and service providers will increasingly turn to ideas borrowed from research in robotics — such as how to sense, anticipate, interpret, respond, and take appropriate action under dynamically changing conditions — to create new generations of products, devices (e.g. smarter cell phones, computers and automobiles) and environments (e.g. intelligent buildings) that are more self-aware and context-aware.

… And Our Appliances, as well as Our Environments Become Smarter Research on how to design robots to be social and dexterous is helping us understand how to develop the most effective multi-modal user interfaces for human-machine interaction. And, due to the fact that mobile robots need to understand how to navigate uncertain terrain, avoid obstacles, know where they are and where they are going — in constantly changing environments — this new generation of robots represents the leading edge of what’s exciting in computing systems of all kinds.

By designing such embedded intelligence and awareness into all future systems, manufacturers and developers of all kinds of future computing devices and services can create smarter, intuitive products, personalized services and attentive environments.