Eliminating Distance

Our country's ability to lead the next technical revolution requires that we find more black students for engineering graduate school. The Internet has made it easier for American companies to target consumers worldwide. But with that expanded reach comes the necessity to design products for a more diverse consumer. It’s a challenging task, especially for companies with traditional engineering workforces. And frankly, sometimes the results are not just poor but embarrassing. Not long ago, Google experienced one such diversity-linked failure that took a toll on its public image. While using artificial intelligence to build a facial recognition system, Google trained its computers to recognize skin tones according to the Fitzpatrick Scale developed in 1975 for work on skin cancer patients. When Google debuted its facial recognition system, the public was not amused. The system famously misclassified black faces as gorillas! No one knew why. Then it was discovered that the Fitzpa

Today, I measured the gulf between education and expertise - and it's pretty large. All of us have an area where we are the expert. For example, when it comes to robot design, colleagues come to me for advice. But, no matter our expertise, there will be work where our inexperience will not only delay completion, it will render the final product less than what it could have been. Today, many experts store their knowledge on the Internet for anyone to use. When I am stuck in the mire of a home project for which I had insufficient experience, a well-placed Google search or YouTube video can be my lifeline. When it comes to intellectual pursuits like paper writing, a self-help video is less instructive. For these, I need an expert's personal attention. Lately, I struggled to complete an editorial writing assignment. My subject is that HBCUs are the best resource for diversifying the STEM graduate pool. I am an educated recruiter who has written many research articles. But I am no e

Note: This post was edited using Grammarly . I made a video of the editing process which you can watch here:   Dr. White, my journalism professor, gave me an editorial writing assignment. I decided to write about recruiting black engineers for graduate school. The high concentration of black engineers graduating from HBCUs means it will be more efficient to recruit black engineers for graduate school from HBCUs than from PWIs. I worked diligently on the assignment, even going as far as creating a word cloud image to include as a graphic. When I had completed the first draft, I submitted it. A few days later it was time to submit the final version. I edited it a bit before turning in the corrected version of my editorial. At the time I thought it was pretty good; boy was I wrong. As part of the peer review, a classmate reviewed my editorial and stated that she was unsure if I was arguing for or against black engineers going to HBCUs for graduate school. As I re-read my editorial, I sa

I’m one of those people. You know, the kind who has to be told something important multiple times. I hope you’re not like that. This week, Dr. White, my journalism professor, told our class that when you are writing an editorial you should begin with a hard-hitting, active voice, eye-grabbing statement that follows the inverted pyramid model. In other words, you present the who, what, where, when, and how of the story before you get into its details. The statement that does all of this upfront, grabbing the attention of the reader before he is presented with a bunch of details, is called the “lead”. In effect, a writer should not bury the lead! Right there it hit me. I’d heard this somewhere before.  Last semester a graduate student asked me to review a research paper they had written. As is always the case, there were small grammar errors and word choice issues to correct. More importantly, there was a style problem that was only revealed when I asked the student to explain a point th

Does journalism get a bad rap? I think it does. By definition jour·nal·ism is the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast. In effect, journalism is something we partake in every day. As we go to and fro, much of what we see in the world is viewed through the filter of journalism. Whether by a TV advertisement, radio news show, or YouTube blogger, each of us has found a journalistic personality or channel that we trust to introduce us to current events, new takes on an old idea, or just a fun respite from the monotony of life. As a consumer of journalism, I never knew why a particular piece makes me stop and pay attention. And that is important because I'm not only a consumer but also a producer of new technologies in my day job as a robotics researcher. To be successful in the long term, I will need everyday consumers to understand the advancements I make in my lab. If I can do what good journalism does well, p

 This is my first blog post on Blogger!