SIRoS:

Tom is a highly accomplished medical roboticist and seasoned leader of engineering teams capable of developing breakthrough innovation in surgical robotics. Tom holds multiple patents in robotics and surgical devices and has an extensive track record of taking surgical robotic platforms to market, having managed multiple surgical robotics products through 510k approval.

Tom, is on the founding team of Activ Surgical, leverging technology developed at Childrens National Medical Center in Washington DC to create the first machine learning engine for surgical robotics. Activ is delivering innovative real time visualization and perception data to the surgical staff, enabling higher levels of confidence in even the most demanding procedures.

Prior to Activ, Tom was the Director of Advanced Robotics at Medrobotics, where he led the development and release of the first flexible surgical robotics platform .While at Medrobotics, Tom’s group was responsible for winning multiple design awards for innovation and product design of highly articulated surgical robotics. During his time there, he grew the Advanced Robotics group from 2 to 50+ employees including clinical, electrical, software, and mechanical engineering.

Kade Crockford is the Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. Kade works to protect and expand core First and Fourth Amendment rights and civil liberties in the digital 21st century, focusing on how systems of surveillance and control impact not just the society in general but their primary targets—people of color, Muslims, immigrants, and dissidents.

The Information Age produces conditions facilitating mass communication and democratization, as well as dystopian monitoring and centralized control. The Technology for Liberty Program aims to use our unprecedented access to information and communication to protect and enrich open society and individual rights by implementing basic reforms to ensure our new tools do not create inescapable digital cages limiting what we see, hear, think, and do.

Sydney Levine is a postdoctoral scholar in the Psychology Department at Harvard and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.  She studies the moral judgment and decision-making of adults, children, and artificial intelligences.  She received a PhD in psychology from Rutgers.

Brian Scassellati is a Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University and Director of the NSF Expedition on Socially Assistive Robotics. His research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Using computational modeling and socially interactive robots, his research evaluates models of how infants acquire social skills and assists in the diagnosis and quantification of disorders of social development (such as autism). His other interests include humanoid robots, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, machine perception, and social learning.

Dr. Scassellati received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. His dissertation work (Foundations for a Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot) with Rodney Brooks used models drawn from developmental psychology to build a primitive system for allowing robots to understand people. His work at MIT focused mainly on two well-known humanoid robots named Cog and Kismet. He also holds a Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (1995), and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (1995) and Brain and Cognitive Science (1995), all from MIT.

Dr. Scassellati’s research in social robotics and assistive robotics has been recognized within the robotics community, the cognitive science community, and the broader scientific community.