Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist and the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Education
Howard received her Bachelor of Surgery in Engineering from Brown University in 1993 and her Master of Surgery and Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Her thesis Recursive Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation was advised by George A. Bekey.
Howard also holds a M.B.A with a concentration in Strategy from Claremont Graduate University in 2005.
Career
In 2003, she was named to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. She was featured in TIME magazine’s "Rise of the Machines" article in 2004. In 2008, Howard received worldwide attention for her SnoMote robots, designed to study the impact of global warming on the Antarctic ice shelfs.
Education Shortly after finishing her undergraduate studies at Brown, Howard headed up the software team at Axcelis, Incorporated., coding the first commercial genetic algorithm package Evolver.
Later she joined National Aeronautics and Space Administration"s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she led research efforts on various robotic projects utilizing soft computing methodologies such as computer vision, fuzzy logic, and neural networks. She primarily worked on the Mobility Systems Concept Development as a Senior Robotics Researcher, and the Technology Review journal named her as one of the world"s top young innovators of 2003 for her work in this area.
In 2005, Howard left Jet Propulsion Laboratory to join the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor and founded the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory. Press and Media On several occasions, Howard has been a guest on the Cable News Network and Public Broadcasting Service television networks Research Howard describes her research as "centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems".