Exploring the promises and challenges of AI with Ayanna Howard ’93

Way back in middle school, Ayanna Howard ’93 faced a required classroom assignment: what was she planning for a career?

She was already entranced by science fiction. She was a Star Wars fan, drawn to characters like R2-D2, Luke Skywalker’s faithful robot companion. Most of all, she had a favorite TV show, “The Bionic Woman,” about a former tennis star who suffers near-fatal injuries in a skydiving accident. Through replacement bionic implants, she becomes a cyborg with extraordinary powers and a life full of action fighting evil.

Howard was struck by the idea of building a bionic woman. She had already taught herself computer programming in third grade. She loved building stuff with her father, an engineer, who taught her to solder and brought home Radio Shack kits for her to assemble.

So the middle school version of Howard thought she knew where she was going — medical school. However, that took a detour at the start of high school when dissecting a frog showed her that biology was not for her. Still, she loved math and making things, and by the end of high school she found her lasting pathway in engineering.

Today Howard, the dean of Ohio State University’s School of Engineering and the first woman to head that school, is a national leader in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Her research has been published in more than 250 peer-reviewed publications and she is a prominent voice about both the opportunities and dangers in the fields, including how to guard against problems and the acute need for diversity in researchers.

Artificial intelligence has hugely expanded and migrated in recent decades, Howard says. It used to be limited to a few sectors, such as manufacturing and government. “Now automation is in our daily lives, this combination of robotics and artificial intelligence,” she says, and people are constantly interacting with it directly, on their phones and in many other ways.

To Howard, the combination of AI and robotics holds particular promise in many important areas, such as health care, education, and moves toward economic equality. In health care, where much of Howard’s research has been, there are already the beginnings of personalized health agents through watches and other devices. Robots can help on many other tasks, such as with rehabilitation, an area she has explored for children with special needs. Robots can act as exercise coaches, interact with infants and young children with games, and facilitate conversations with older adults with dementia.

In education, Howard says robotics and AI can help “augment our environment,” including helping people when they age and their minds are strong but their bodies weaken. She believes workforce training and other approaches that can be aided by robotics and AI can help ensure that “every person has equal outcomes in terms of health” and can obtain important comforts of life.

“At the end of the day, we’re designing robots to help people,” Howard said in a 2022 interview with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “People want a higher quality of life and more efficiency in their lives. Robots fill those needs. They make us better people, and once we start using them, we don’t want to go back to what it was like before.”

One of the most exciting developments underway in robotics, she says, is the growth in natural language communication with robots, “It makes the interaction much more natural.”  Engineering is central to the development of robotics and AI, and as Howard says, “engineering is what is required to build the world.” 

For all that robotics and AI have already achieved and their promise for the future, Howard recognizes there are substantial dangers inherent in them, and she is working on identifying and trying to fix them.

Prime among the problems, she says, is the tendency of people to overtrust technology. “We inherently trust technology after we adopt it,” she says, “We get into this more habitual state.” Society needs to push hard for a reboot on technology, to question it regularly after adoption.

When she traveled to Davos, Switzerland in January 2024 for the World Economic Forum, Howard led the session, “How to Trust Technology.” She talked about her research on a robot guiding people during a simulated emergency evacuation and how people generally followed the robot even when it led them away from clearly marked exits.

It is also dangerous that robots and AI are learning from existing data that has bias built in, such as based on race, ethnicity, or age. More ways need to be found to compensate for the data and augment it, and in 2021, she published Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, an audiobook that looked at how racial and sexual biases are infecting AI and how to fight back.

Howard says more work is needed to find ways to blend the human emotional quotient with technology, so people can better evaluate the technology and see when it needs to be modified. Robots and other AI models have to be programmed so they acknowledge when they do not know the answer or how to act.

Howard has been a champion of increasing diversity in the fields of robotics and AI in order to mitigate the risks of bias and also lead the way toward better development of projects and improved outcomes. She gives the example of whether you would want a team of all women engineers to design a men’s bathroom, or only men to design a bathroom for women. “If you don’t have someone in the room to say, wait, this is not going to work for this target demographic, it’s hard for someone who doesn’t have that lived experience to even see that,” she says.

Howard says that progress has been made to include a greater number of women and non-white researchers in the field, but more is essential. She is one of the national directors of the group Black in Robotics, which advocates for diversity and helps advance it through networking, mentorship, and other steps. 

Howard also believes more attention needs to be paid to ethics as they relate to robotics. Some people talk about using robots in war situations, for instance, but she cautions that unintended consequences need to be considered. She believes that rules for the use and actions of robots must be considered, and that step needs to be taken before robots go into use.

Howard has long ties to Brown. She was born in Providence to parents who were finishing their Sc.B. degrees at Brown, Johnetta MacCalla ’72 and Eric MacCalla Jr. ’73. The family soon moved to southern California, where Howard grew up. When it came time to pick a college, it seemed like MIT would be her place. She went on a college visit there, and she visited Brown as a nod to her parents even though it seemed an unlikely fit for her. 

It did not go according to plan. She did not gravitate to MIT, recalling, “I can’t be with a whole bunch of people who are just like me.” And she instantly fell for Brown — “I like being able to interact with different people, different mindsets.” 
Once at Brown she embraced the Open Curriculum, and besides a core of engineering courses she took classes like African-American literature, poetry, and music. She took her first formal courses in robotics and “anything remotely related” she could find to explore “automation,” the term at the time for what became artificial intelligence. Helping an engineering professor, she worked on manipulation, coding a robot arm. Howard says, “I would say engineering, and a liberal approach to engineering, is really what Brown gave me. I didn’t know how valuable that was until I went into the field and had to build real stuff.”

After Brown, she went back to California for a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, and she later earned her M.B.A. from Claremont Graduate University.

She worked for more than a decade at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she became a senior robotics researcher, including working on SmartNav, a robot designed to help scientists collect data on Mars, and SnoMotes, a group of small robots intended to autonomously explore icy terrains for understanding climate change.

In 2005 she joined Georgia Tech University as a professor and in 2017 became the chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. Her research and applied work largely shifted focus from being space related to health care. She founded and directed the Human-Automation Systems Lab at Georgia Tech, helping design robots and addressing issues of human-robot interaction, learning, and autonomous control. She built the school’s robotics program, including human-robot interaction therapy for children with disabilities, and she also started a nonprofit company, Zyrobotics, developing educational technologies to help children with differing needs and abilities.

In 2020, Howard was named dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering, which has more than 10,000 students, and became a professor in the college’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.