Ayanna Howard designs and builds robots that learn from and interact with people, in order to help improve quality of life.

Why you should listen

As an educator, researcher and innovator, Dr. Ayana Howard focuses on designing intelligent robots to enhance our daily lives. She is professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her published works, currently numbering more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, have been widely disseminated in international journals and conference proceedings. She continues to produce novel research and ideas focused on applications that span from assistive robots in the home to AI-powered STEM apps for children with diverse learning needs.

Howard began her career working as a roboticist at NASA in the early '90s and then transitioned into academia in the early 2000s. In 2013, she also founded Zyrobotics, which is focused on developing STEM educational products to engage children of all abilities. Her accomplishments have received numerous recognitions, including highlights in USA Today, Upscale and TIME Magazine. She was named a top young innovator by MIT Technology Review and was recognized as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world by Business Insider.

More news and ideas from Ayanna Howard

Live from TEDWomen

Getting started: Notes from Session 2 of TEDWomen 2018

November 29, 2018

In an early morning session hosted by podcaster and TED2017 speaker Manoush Zomorodi, six speakers — Lucy Cooke, Ayanna Howard, Nivruti Rai, Monique W. Morris, Karissa Sanbonmatsu and Amanda Williams — brought us insights from the worlds of AI, robotics, epigenetics, education, and the wonderfully slow world of the sloth. Sustainability lessons from the sloth. Sloths […]

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