Byron Reese welcomes Andrea Thomaz on to discuss the nature of intelligence and intellectual growth and how that pertains to both robotics and AI.
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Andrea Thomaz
Andrea is a human-robotics interaction specialist and builds social robot assistants that help people with chores, with the goal of using automation to help tackle some of the biggest problems facing our society, like healthcare.
Her company, Diligent Robotics, is focused first on thoughtfully introducing robot assistants into the healthcare industry as it’s one of society’s most comprehensive challenges. “Moxi” is their hospital robot assistant that they designed to help nurses with their non-patient-facing tasks so nurses have more time for the activities that utilize the top of their license like patient care. In addition to Diligent, she holds a position as a Robotics Professor at UT Austin, where she directs the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab and previously held the same role at Georgia Tech.
Her ultimate vision is to help create a world where robots positvely assist humans as teammates so humans have more time for the stuff in their lives that they want to do and are best at.