um so we could just start by having you
to close your name and
where you were born where you grew up
going to school
so uh my name is danisa
i come from sweden but originally i was
born in croatia
i was educated there about the
high school and the university and then
i left croatia for sweden to do my phd
in robotics in sweden what was the
university
um the name of the university in croatia
is technical university of the edcam
and where did you go for your graduate
work
um wait now what's graduate work
that's like my phd right so my phd
is or has been performed at kth
in sweden in stockholm what did you
study as an undergraduate
mechanical engineering computer science
for phd
what made you decide to switch from
mechanical engineering to computers
i didn't really give it too much thought
it came very naturally so
when i saw an ad it wasn't stated
particularly
that the phd will be in computer science
because the center
was a interdisciplinary center and
included all different areas it just
by chance ended up to be computer
science
but it did have a relation because my
high school education
it has been really in the area of
programming and mathematics so it was
very very natural for me to just
basically go back to that
at what point did you discover an
interest in robotics or artificial
intelligence
um i suppose that i was always
interested in machines or
building doing things and programming
them in some way
but i really never you know thought
about
doing phd in robotics really that that
came
um it just sounded interesting so when i
saw an
ad uh for for uh well the announcement
for the phd positions
by that time it was in like 97
i didn't do really any robotics research
but i felt that the background that i
had in mechanical engineering and
programming
would be suitable yeah and i was right
and so who did you work with so for my
phd
at kth i worked with professor hendrick
christensen
who is now georgia tech and i also work
with the
professor yanulov eklund who is
in the area of computer vision and what
was the project
so um the idea at that time was
to equip robots with different types of
uh visual capabilities so
uh the robot should be able to detect
and recognize different types of objects
and then
interact with objects for the purpose of
grasping them and manipulating them
and what were the big challenges for
that
oh big challenges back in 97 cameras i
would say i mean
many things changed right now you know
you just go and buy very cheap 3d
sensor that can do many things for you
but in 97
we just had regular cameras and
we couldn't process things in real time
in the same way as we do
now so the problems are basically um
the problems that we are working on
still right now in terms of doing
um let's say lots of dynamics
robots interacting with objects and so
on
the same challenges existed then but we
couldn't do things as fast as we can do
them now
and were there a lot of other faculty uh
students working in robotics
so the interesting thing was that when
the center for autonomous systems
where i was employed was initiated in 96
the idea was to employ
i think it was eight to ten phd students
at the same time
and each phd student got a project to
work on
and that was really really interesting
because uh well from one point of view
it was interesting because i was the
only girl
and the rest of uh were guys and most of
them were
if i'm not mistaken swedish studying at
kth so i was like from a different
country
studying something completely different
before i started computer science
and so it was a pretty large group
so eight to ten phd students starting at
the same time
and was it challenging to be a foreigner
and a woman in that country
i think that the most challenging thing
was that i was not used to
the uh let's say working environment
that they were used to right so they
were all studying at kth before
they knew how to use lots of the
you know like the programming
environment and everything it was like
completely normal to them because they
used to have it in their courses so that
was new to me
plus the language was also new i didn't
speak swedish and some of the courses
were given in swedish so
that was also new challenging
um and so who were some of the other
students that you worked with
so one of the students who is now
professor at georgia tech was magnus
egested
so he he was i think also employed one
of the
first phd students at the center
um another person was patrick yansfeld
who is also professor in robotics at kth
um who do we have more
uh some other people i mean some people
are now
uh also well still at kth
maybe they were away you know for a
postdoc or had a career in industry for
example but then
now coming back at kth actually in my
group
um yeah and what was the environment of
robotics like in sweden more generally
at the time so were there other
universities and industries
um from one point of view i think that
um
i mean having robotics research in in
sweden it came
like very natural you know abb having
abb is swedish company one of the first
producers of robots and so on
but there have not been so much research
at that time like in the
mid 90s on let's say
service robotics and that was the idea
for the center starting with service
robotics and
making making change there so i think it
was a good environment because um
originally we also thought that the
industry will understand and
that they will give us projects and that
there will be more collaboration but adb
at that time did not have so much
interest in doing something that was in
the direction of service robotics
and what did you do when you completed
your phd
yeah yeah so that was in 2001
um i was um um by the end of my phd i
was offered a position
um um as a postdoc at kth
since the center basically continued to
employ new people and so on so
there was definitely a need for senior
staff but
i also wanted to do a post doc somewhere
so i wanted to go somewhere and
um get a little bit of understanding how
it is to be
in a different environment so i did
actually two things um
the final year of my phd i spent six
seven months at columbia university with
professor peter allen
where we addressed some grasping related
problems
and real-time model based tracking stuff
that was really interesting
um so that was the first kind of like
longer visit
and then in 2003 i
joined johns hopkins university and the
group of professor greg
gregory hager where at that time the
big interest was on human machine
collaborative systems of different types
so humans and robots
or humans using robots to perform
different tasks better and their
application was in
uh microsurgery
and then uh she went back the case and
then i went back to kth
so while i continued as as assistant
professor
um and then in 2007 i think yeah
i became a full professor
and i'm still there yeah i'm still there
now i'm yeah yes the director of the
center
we grew pretty much now i think we have
like 25 phd students
at a time and quite some faculty also
great so what were some of the robots
that you actually used
when you're working i think so the first
robot that we purchased
and that was during my phd was a puma
arm
like a completely big
bulky industrial robot and the idea was
to
just test it you know for some pick and
place tasks and it was difficult because
it actually came with the original
industrial
setup and the programming language that
was designed specifically for that
arm and it actually didn't have any
gripper
so uh you know we were just basically
sitting in a workshop and building
something that looked like a parallel
gel gripper so that the hand could
actually
pick something up and so after that
i think that we were actually one of the
first universities that
bought a big xr 4000 robot from
pneumatic technologies and that was
another challenge
uh so that robot we uh put the puma arm
on
and uh i remember that we were very
proud because you know we uh there are
like three pcs
used for different controlling different
things like the motion
and the arm and uh we used real-time
linux and q and x
so everything was on that poor platform
that was moving around and
i i think that at that time we didn't
think very much about that but it was
really heavy and dangerous
and never killed any phd students but
yeah it was interesting and
there was something for everybody to do
okay were there some others after
i think that that we bought just about
anything that that
we were able to buy um if
you know there was a good reason and it
was needed in the project because
soon after the the the start we started
with big
european projects collaborative projects
and in those uh it was very common to
actually have
platform that was available for all the
universities or each university had
their own
platform that are involved in the
project so
so what did we have if i can remember
right now
we had a
oh i don't remember now the company that
produced those
with active perception now i don't
remember
you will need to cut this anyway uh
but um i should remember that because we
have four or five of those
um it doesn't really matter so
what we did uh partially uh we we were
buying platforms from different
companies and we were also building
things so for example we bought
lots of different parts joint parts from
shank and we built a dual arm robot
where each arm had seven degrees of
freedom uh
we actually had two setups like that and
then we still have them
and can use them and we also most
recently
then also bought pr2 and
yeah i think we have most of the things
that that
kind of mostly are based well i mean we
were always as the as the lab
always interested to do both mobility
and manipulation so it was extremely
important for us to have
robots that could do both and uh there
are not so many robots out there that
can do good manipulation you know so
in terms of that that the the arms are
small enough so that the robot can do
navigation and slam and everything that
we wanted to do
but at the same time manipulate
everyday objects not something that was
like you know toys or
um yeah small stuff that that
uh you would have specifically for the
research purposes but we wanted robots
to really interact with everyday objects
humans
so you mentioned some european
collaborations projects can you talk
about who you
so i can i can take the first that that
i coordinated so these uh projects are
uh pretty big they're on the level of
let's say
one million um dollars or
no more let me see i need to convert
everything
yeah no it's more than that it's like 8
million euros
what's that in dollars it's
approximately the same right
yeah because there are a bit more 10
million dollars so that's why i'm saying
one million dollar did not sound well so
okay
we cut there um anyway so um these
european projects
are collaborations between uh several
different
european universities and some of them
also include companies
so um one of the projects that i
coordinated was called grasp
and naturally it had the main topic of
equipping robots with different
capabilities to interact with
objects but also to learn from humans
how
humans manipulate and interact with
objects in their everyday
life so that project um
started in 2008 and i think it had a
budget like
eight million dollars for four years
and uh apart from i think it was six or
seven
uh university partners we also had a
company
which is ottobock and that company
produces intelligent prosthesis
in particular we were interested in
hands so
the part of the project addressed the
problem of how could we understand from
humans
which fingers are important what is that
humans do with their hands
in everyday life and how can we then
build better models
for actuated prosthetic hands
so uh apart from uh then that company
uh we also had um ludwig maximilian
university
from munich
and professor heiner deubel who was
especially interested in looking into
humans so his psychologist
and looks into how humans use their
ocular motor system
in interaction with hands to to
interact with objects and then several
other universities like
uh culture institute of technology we
had the fort institute from greece
from crete we had technical university
of vienna
we had finnish university la parande
university of technology
and then kth so one of the things we're
interested
in is funding where people get funding
so i assume this is an european union
brand but could you talk a bit about
how you coordinate with different labs
around europe then
yeah so getting money for robotics
research i mean one would think that
it will get easier but it gets more
difficult and i think that the reason
for that is that
there are more and more people doing
robotics and
also that robotics seems to be an
integral technology for
many other areas so sometimes it's not
so very clear you know what's robotics
and what's not what's something else
and so in europe we have
definitely then they did the possibility
of applying for these collaborative
projects which i think were an excellent
thing for
europe because it it
made it easier for each others right
from
from from labs from different countries
to get to know each other to get to know
about
each other's research and also to
exchange research results so i think
that that was really really excellent
so the calls um that that are in
of interest to roboticists um i would
say that they come out
only or almost on annual basis
and um the acceptance rate is rather low
you know we talk about 10 to 20 percent
so it's difficult to get them and it
requires some work i would say that
that's negative kind of
thing about having this big project
because writing a proposal with seven
other
universities that takes some time
getting together having all the meetings
and then also when the project is
granted
it does take some time to you know do
all the paperwork and
you can't expect that all seven partners
that participate in the project will
collaborate with everybody
so you need to have a good coordinator
that can identify who is to collaborate
with who when when
so what then the results can be really
really cool
and you have to compartmentalize the
research a bit more when you have that
many
yeah i mean it it it takes a bit of
planning
and that's why i always say it's really
really important to have good
coordinators of those projects
that can push people require things and
i usually say don't ever invite your
friends
to to projects like that because maybe
at the end of the project you will end
up not to be a friend
to them anymore yeah have you kept track
of what's going on in robotics in
croatia and um
yeah absolutely i mean i do have a good
collaboration with the university in
zagreb and professor ivan petrovich
there
and they had several
both national and international projects
that they involved me in
the latest project that they had was
really interesting one because they
it was more for establishing robotics as
a field
uh at their university
so they employed lots of young promising
people there
they were pretty early with the hands
yeah they they uh in belgrade like
foreign precisely
one of the first building a robotic hand
that's really real
it's it's a cool thing kind of like you
know to to look back and
think about that
um and how has robotics changed in
sweden at the time that you've done that
so if i look back like this 15 years
apart from from from the area really be
getting bigger
you know maybe we started at fewer
universities now now there are people
doing robotics
at several universities in sweden
addressing
issues that are of different
natures and have different application
areas i mean we have people doing
industrial robotics
people that are more interested into
service robotics and use of robotics
for disabled people for elderly people
and then lots of developments when it
comes to
forestry for example
and what was the experience like when
you were at columbia
it was a good experience i
i think that well this was like the
first longer visit that i did
and um it was also away from the group
i mean you know for three years i was
doing my phd
in a group that that it was like lots of
colleagues like eight other phd
students we were taking courses together
we were programming together and so on
and then
you leave and all of a sudden you are in
a new group
and at that point there are not so many
phd students working
on the on on the problem that i was
working at
i collaborated with andrew miller who is
now in google if i'm not mistaken
and yeah we had lots of fun uh it was a
little bit of a challenge because i
think that he was doing his practice or
something like that
in in in phillips or something like that
at that point
so he needed to commute uh to his job
every day and then he would come to la
in the evening and so i had really
really long days
but it was really really interesting
because i could attend different talks
the robotics group was also very close
to both the graphics group
and the computer vision group of sharing
ir so i had lots of lots of interaction
with people that were doing
very different things and i think that
for every phd student
it's really really important to broaden
their views while they're doing the
phd because if you just concentrate on
one topic
it's very likely that you know maybe you
will
become very good in that but
as soon as you search for a postdoc you
need to write a letter of motivation how
you can do something more
and not everybody understands that on
time so i was lucky
to to actually um i got the ability to
do that or possibility to do that
and the time you were at hopkins you
sort of left grasping and went to
collaboration
yeah so um i mean it was not a
completely new area
because um the topic that i was supposed
to work on was
task sequencing so a part of the things
that i have done
in my phd was on that topic so
let's say for robot is to open a door
how would you sequence that task the
robot first needs to detect the door it
needs to approach the door it needs to
detect the door handle it needs to
visually servo
uh the hand towards the handle and so on
so
you know um a part again of my phd
address this
task specification and then professor
hager who was actually an opponent
on my phd thesis so he was in my
evaluation committee saw
a part of that work and said well you
know you can take this kind of like task
decomposition or this
task decomposition thinking and apply it
in a micro surgical setting
so the work was really only about how
would we develop a system that would do
some form of task decomposition that
that was that was the work and what were
some of the other projects that you've
done at kth
last week so many one of the
more recent one that just ended last
year it was called
tomsey and it was concerned
with how do we use different types of
topological notions
to design plan motion planning
algorithms for grasping for example
and how do we address some of the
difficult problems in terms of
uncertainty and unsafe systems
uh to to achieve than robustness
so that was the one that i liked a lot
because
we worked with mathematicians so
it opened i would say a completely new
way of thinking of how we could do
things and mathematically model them
and that actually now ended up also uh
in in writing a new proposal and uh that
was that was just finance that will
start next year
which is financed by the swedish
financier it's knut and alice valenberry
a foundation which
includes then a way of thinking so how
could we use different types of
let's say mathematical
techniques uh to understand
that that i don't know writing it with a
pen
is very similar with using
some tool to to to mix a soup
how does the robot understand that how
does the robot model that how does the
robot hold the pen
or that tool in a similar way
other projects uh let me see what do we
have more um
yes um one of the projects that that we
would like to
uh actually uh yeah we would like to
give it a little bit more attention but
it
requires collaboration with
people that are not yet let's say
skilled in using
robotics technology and that has to do
with developing systems for elderly
and developing system also for disabled
so there are different types of robotic
appliances that we are thinking about
here
it can be systems that are really not
completely autonomous and mobile
but system that systems that just remind
people that they need to take medicine
or help them to let's say move
about in the environment or systems that
are completely kind of well
boring robots you know those logistic um
that's all logistic problems such as uh
delivering medicine uh or just carrying
around
food and uh and this is more like than
interaction with the medical personnel
and
in terms of uh day letting us know what
is that takes time for a nurse
you know she's running around just
fetching things
uh whole day instead of you know sitting
with patients and talking to them
it would be much much better if she has
a robot that follows her
in her daily work and every time she
needs to kind of fetch something
or inform something about somebody about
something
it would be a robot doing that so um
in industry we talk a lot about you know
third
hand so having a robot that interacts
with a human worker and helps
a human worker when when there is a need
for that
this would be a system or logistics
system that would help a nurse to
run instead of her and do some of the
errands
great any others um
i'm thinking of my list um
yes um um and one of the recent projects
that we also started at kth
um and that that professor patrick
yanfeld who is
in the group is responsible for it's
called cantauro
a building it's a european project so
building a platform that has legs
and an upper part looks like a cantara
and that is used
for let's say remote uh
remote control in in uh sending a robot
platform out
at the terrain that is difficult
to uh let's say or dangerous for a for a
human
to be at but then that platform
being really teleoperated by human that
wears a suit like an exoskeleton so
instead of
uh let's say having a remote control
which might be very unnatural to
understand how to control
a robot's motion you wear a suit then
and you move your body good for training
too
and so you got more into haptics and
things
yeah there are a couple of things that
we are a couple of projects that we have
that are more
on the partially haptics but mostly
multi-sensory integration so haptics uh
forced work vision and the idea has
always been that
having several sensory modalities can
only help
and to some extent also maybe mimic
biological systems or get inspired by
biological systems to implement let's
say multi-sensory
robot system and the idea is that
robots can visually then or with laser
detect objects but the interaction
is then fully forced or tactile based
and the interesting thing there is how
the robots
get more information about the
environment or the robots
through touching so that's one of the
things that we have been recently
working on
a lot how do we build models how many
times does a robot need to
touch an object to understand its
geometry
and then more interesting things that
it's not only geometry but
what's in the package can the robot
understand how much
of the milk there is left in the cart
in the package or uh whether there is
like a coffee or a flour
in a package and all of that can be done
through tactile sensing
it's not easy but yeah can you talk a
bit about
the sort of the problem of complex
dynamic cluttered environments and
grasping and manipulating within those
and how the multi-sensor really helps
so um robots working in natural
environments that
are dynamic and commonly changing
yes it is definitely a challenge and i
think that this is one of the big
reasons why
we don't see the deployment of robots in
in
like service type of applications as we
maybe hoped
and there are many challenges uh apart
from from
things at our homes not being
very structured and also homes being
very different
just the understanding of how different
homes can be
that that's still something that we need
to do a little bit
of research on a couple of years ago at
kth we had this project
that was well it's still up there
and we encouraged people to take their
kinect
and just scan their kitchens and their
living rooms and upload the data
uh to the site where we could then build
3d models and the idea was to have
you know all these models of living
rooms and kitchens just to understand
how different these rooms
can be so that's one of the challenges
so
first understanding what
a kitchen may look like or what a
bedroom can look like once having the
models
and using them for doing all sorts of
different things
it's another challenge so how do we
understand
where objects are commonly placed just
understanding the whole statistics
of natural scenes so how often
is there a pen on the floor and how
often is on the table
and not disregarding the information
that is not very
let's say common a pen on the floor
maybe happens in like one to two percent
of cases but it might be really really
important
in case if you have a toddler at home
and you want the robot to signal or
there is a potentially dangerous
object on the floor and robot goes and
picks it up
so apart from as i said
generating and collecting all the
information of how things may look like
in our homes
is also defining the problems that we
want to address
and those problems need to be uh of
interest to to the end users right so if
we if we want them to buy robots
and and and use them in their in their
their
uh let's say daily lives we need to
motivate it well we need to say
that well it's not only about cleaning
it's about making your homes more safe
great um and could you talk a bit more
about where you've gotten funding and
if you've collaborated with industry
so um the funding that we have at the
center
a big portion of it of course comes from
the european union
and we try to be really uh
careful there because you can't have too
many eu projects at the same time
otherwise it's too much traveling and
true to too much administrative overhead
so we tried to balance that with some of
the national funding
in sweden there are there is a swedish
research council that finances basic
research
and you know one may wonder is robotics
really basic research or is that applied
research but i think that still there
are many many questions
in robotics when it comes to development
of uh
let's say mathematical techniques for
encoding
all the data and all the knowledge that
that we can extract
that's very much basic science so
swedish research council has been
financing some of our projects
and then we have two more uh foundations
or eight
agencies that are more
let's say focusing on financing applied
research
and at the end research that is so close
to let's say industrial application or
product development
so that through their help we could also
uh let's say have different startups or
close collaboration with
with industry and these are foundation
for strategic research in sweden
and uh vinova they are called
and uh in these projects yes we have
been having collaboration and
have current collaboration with
companies such as abb
and scania the interesting thing is that
during the part during the past couple
of years we have also have some startups
so i would like to mention a volumental
a very nice young agile company that is
all about
you know 3d scanning and i think it's
really really interesting because
applications they are talking about
is like you know i would scan my feet
and then i would find the perfect
shoe that matches my feet or perfect
clothes that matches my body
and people often ask will robotics
generate new jobs will there be
and and i say i just asked my husband
maybe it exists i don't know of it like
you know like 10-15 years ago we had
this um
company companies or shops where you
could go
and copy a bunch of papers and things
like that those almost disappeared today
but i think we'll have places where you
go and scan yourself
and if you gain some weight or if you
lose some weight you potentially will
need to scan yourself often
partially because there will be
companies than selling you know
fitted clothes and shoes and all
different products
based on let's say how you look
but maybe also for medical reasons right
so so i think that
we haven't yet seen a complete
development of that field
i think that's going to be big right
because the company that are just now
selling clothes to a
average x they i think they'll start to
look into how they can start to sell
fitted clothes
so they will need much more personnel
right
to fit that clothes to you and you will
get it home so you will not
need to take care of that yourself and
feed it yourself to to you
and i also think that there will be then
also different types of medical
uh appliances and so on maybe things
that we need that that
ease the back pain or something like
that it will be much much easier to
sell to individuals if they have
your your um body model
and is that a startup that you've been
involved with personally
it has been my husband but so i know a
lot about that but
the phd students that they have started
the company some of them have been
financed by the projects that i have
uh gained or yeah have there been other
startups
yeah we had a couple of others that that
one of the startups it was bought by a
bigger company
i forgot the name part of the work that
we do
is on image-based processing so
the company looked into
how we could develop a system
for having the bus tickets and train
tickets
on your phone so it was basically
developing a machine that could just do
a reading of any ticket in any bus or
any any train
and then also a company
oculus ai that
looked into uh well different types of
images
individual of individuals and looking
into how we could use
then digital image processing uh for
for retrieving or dealing with different
types of information
and who are some of the phd students or
postdocs that you've trained that have
gone on to work in robotics so um a
couple of the first ones that i had
they went to industry i didn't know
whether i was like a really tough
supervisor in the beginning and i scared
them off or they
just saw you know i was still struggling
with my academic career
so maybe just say oh the hell with that
i just got to go and do something normal
anyway so stefan and danielle both of
them
left for for industry and they are doing
really really well right now daniel is
it
um started in intel and i think that he
now changed but
um both of them have pretty high
positions
um there uh in their companies and
two of the most recent ones that i'm
really proud of are
jeanette and javier and both of them
are at the max planck institute in
germany
one of them working with stefan schall
and one of them working with
michael black and
jeanette was actually one of the
students
that accompanied that robot
you know the first robot that ever
boarded the plane
i don't know if you know about that but
uh she was one of those uh
that that that uh from la today i like
to yeah precisely
so that was cool um
and could you talk a bit about your
involvement with the ieee
and um
um yeah so um i think that um for for
everybody that is in the field uh it's
it's important to to do
some of the service work too and i think
that
apart from building your network and it
also feels good you know if you feel
that you have
given back something to the society so
um i've been involved
with the ieee for a long time
i think that the first thing that i did
was
i was a chair of the technic one of the
technical committees on computer vision
computer and robot vision and it was
really
um an interesting experience because
during that time i was in contact with
many people
that were doing research uh in in in
this area and i could use them then
as a reviewers both at conferences when
i was uh
the the the editor for some of the
aircrafts and irises but also when i was
associate editor for transactions and
robotics so
you know being involved gives you the
possibility to build a network to also
meet people and some of them are more
serious some of them are less serious
so when you need somebody to do some
work for you you know who to
who to contact and you know who are the
people that are going to do
good job and this is the first
organizing committee that's been all
women
and what are some of the challenges for
getting more women involved in robotics
wow i i think it's like in general like
in any
technical area there are not too many
women and
um it's a challenge i mean um i have a
seven year old boy and now
10 month here a 10 month old baby at
home
and i'm here like you know i can wonder
what am i doing here in us now
but i think that that having kids and
having the responsibility for the family
i think that
um that actually is a challenge to
balance that your academic career it's
not like that that
you cannot travel or something like that
it's like in my case i don't want to
travel
i mean i want to see my kids developing
i want to see
i want to spend all my time with my kids
so it's really really
you know it's a challenge from that
perspective you know that you all the
time must
balance uh who who is more important
and i think that one of the reasons in
general for for making the academic
career is that
you actually need to do so many things
at the beginning when you're
still not the full professor right and
that's
exactly maybe also the time when you get
your kids
so um that's a big challenge and i think
that
many women
feel like i do they they prefer to to
spend their time with kids
and then you get too old
or maybe not too old but you are away
from
from work for for too long and people
forget about you
and are there some initiatives
no i can say i can say more depressing
things so
no i mean i'm just thinking like my son
he's seven right
uh and he he he's actually born with a
very serious brain injury
so he's autistic he's mentally you know
so so
uh that that that was a real challenge
because i felt that
that he can't speak or anything like
that so
so um but from one point of view i mean
this is going to
sound horrible but he cannot communicate
his feelings well
so so i was still able to travel and
everything and and
i got lots of help from my parents and
my my husband's parents
who they they were with him and so on
and
i don't know it just you know worked out
and then we waited for a long time to
get a second
kid i mean i'm 43 i mean who you you
don't get kids when you're 43
if you're not a movie star uh anyway
so so so now we've got um a second child
she's healthy and everything but she
you can see that that she needs you in a
completely different way than he did
and she communicates that so i i i see
that she's sad that she
see that she is like you know she needs
me and
there i think i think it's difficult for
any mom and for any dad for that matter
uh to to um to kind of like travel and
choose career uh instead of um instead
of family
but um i think in general that what we
are fighting the problem
why there are not so many women is that
not so many women
um actually study computer science this
is where the problem starts
you for example take sweden um
most of the girls will go and study
medicine
or economics how do you call that i
don't know what that yeah
so so because there
i i and and the reason is that in sweden
you get in
uh to the university based on your
uh high school grades
and for getting into the medicine or
economics you need
really really high grades and girls
they're really competitive
so they want to go to places where they
need to show that they're the best and
to computer science what we get like
five percent maybe ten percent of girls
not even that
and many of them believe if they on the
way of of
um you know being or finishing computer
science
get a good job and most of them do i
mean we have problems with
with male students too and i hate that i
hate that
companies uh employ them when they start
to do their master thesis
because then they can pay them less
since they are not kind of finished
engineers
and they people just continue to work
and many of them never actually finish
their
university education set
but that's where we are and what do you
think the
the society or the discipline could do
to change that
um it is somehow always expected like
from from um
partially from female researchers to be
good role models you know we should go
around and we should talk about robotics
and about
areas that that
that encourage young girls to apply to
study computer science and mechanical
engineering and so on
yes we can do that and i think that that
the number may increase somewhat but i
also think that
we need to be really realistic and
that's
that's that's not enough i think that
the society as a whole
needs to think okay what are uh the
future
possibilities in general when it comes
to new jobs
what is that where is that i can make a
good career
how can i let's say if i have many
different interests
how can i express those uh in in
in a certain uh let's say area or at a
certain job
and i think that um i mean robotics is
really really wide you know it has this
uh
perspective of like being very technical
but it has uh this aspect aspect of
helping humans right and i think that
many
girls women like to do that do things
that in some way can
increase life quality and so on and i
think that that
if we talk about that often enough
then the girls may see that maybe doing
medicine is the same as doing robotics
because right now when you say medicine
coming up with you let's say medicine or
or
really doing surgery on somebody and
saving lives
that's important for many of the girls
and maybe we say well robotics also
saves lives
then they will maybe think differently
great and a question we always wrap up
with is what is your advice to young
people who might be interested in a
career in robotics
what i think is important is that they
need to understand
that doing career in robotics requires
solid knowledge in very many different
areas
so to some extent people think that oh
it's like you know playing with toys
it's not anything like that
you need to be really strong in
mathematics it's very good if you
are also excellent in programming and
many other things
so uh if you can in some way design
your education so that it covers all
those different areas
that's that that is what i think is
important and then you should also have
a genuine
interest in building things because
building things
and programming things it's really
really exciting when you see something
moving
but it's also very frustrating because
things break all the time
and it's not like you know that we are
sitting in our rooms with paper and a
pen and just do some equations all the
time
it has to do really with integration of
doing this theoretical research and
applied research
and if people like that
then they they they will really enjoy
having
a job or research career as a roboticist
great is there anything else that we
didn't talk about
[Laughter]
like early on um when you mentioned
that the group really started with a
focus on service robotics at kth why
pick service robotics
i think that the reason was that
professor hendrick christensen and uh
the other professor janual of ecklund
they understood that there was a gap
right
there was nothing like that happening in
the sweden happening in sweden
and uh but there were there were notions
of these
kind of aspects happening in europe and
in u.s so i think that it was a very
strategic kind of way of thinking and
planning
very early then that was one reason and
i think that
sweden is a very good country
to address these problems at right
because uh we have
uh let's say an environment or a society
where it is very very important that
everybody has the right to know to the
kind of like medical insurance
that our elderly are taken care of
and that i don't necessarily need to
need to be the person that takes care of
my parents but
that there is a society that there is
something
that is organized in the country
that can do that and robotics appliances
can definitely be one
good tool towards
let's say making
even better in that area yeah making
things better
and is that still the focus and goal
yeah
uh i mean to some extent it has been
maybe more difficult to get all the way
through than we expected
because people always say well i want a
human taking care of me not a machine
and i think that partially it is because
of misunderstanding
nobody wants to take human out of the
loop
we just want those humans that are in
the loop and helping other humans
to have more time to help them because
we do get
older and older there will be more and
more of us sitting
in elderly homes needing help
and apart from us getting older there
are less and less kids being born
right so there will be less and less
humans that can take care of humans
so we will need something else that's
one thing and then it's also kind of
like a paradigm
or the the generation change right i
think that the generations that comes
or come after us they will have much
easier time
of interacting and integrating with
machines
because this is what they do you know uh
from from
being born they they they get used to
use different kind of like gadgets
and the generation that is before me
uh or like my parents and so on they're
not so
so used to that so i understand that
they're skeptical
so after the digital natives will come
to robot natives
yeah well i i to everybody talks about
revolution you know
and that it it will come to some point
at some point
it's natural it will just be there now
the question is how will the
discussion about you know ai taking over
and
will will affect the whole field but
there is a
much more important aspect of the whole
thing and that that that
is being discussed in in sweden right
now and this is
using robots in the manufacturing
industry right
and that has to do like with uh robots
uh
taking over more and more jobs
so uh the question is like uh
will there be time when we don't anymore
need uh let's say
people that are not highly educated but
that have certain skills right that they
are not needed anymore
and that since they don't have good
education they
that cannot be maybe retrained or
educated easily for
for more complex jobs now
um an interesting discussion is how this
is going to affect
the the let's say some of the decisions
that government
takes because all the companies right
now
they pay tax to the state dependent on
how many
employees they have right but let's say
if you would
change the whole thing and they would
basically pay the
tax to the state of how much they
produce
that i think would be then it doesn't
really matter what the robots do things
or whether humans do things right
because then a big amount would be
coming to the state and then the state
can use that money
for further educating those people that
don't have jobs
or potentially doing things and
decisions
that could make us work less maybe only
having four hours working days or
something like that
that would be fantastic
[Laughter]
yeah but it would be cool you know i
mean i think that in
in it will not be
it's not that it's not going to be
normal but it's not going to it's not
going to be unnatural
for more and more people in the future
not working as much as they do now
i don't think that there will be need
for that if everything is automated
and that would be really really fun i
mean you know if you can just kind of
spend time with your
more time with your family with your
relatives and things like that
not for the purpose not not for the
reason um
that that you just have more time but
also because
we change our way of thinking and say
that they feel better
even meet them more often if um
you know we just spend more time
together we have a boost on our kind of
like mental development
and that's really interesting so
everybody says that that the development
that has been made
uh the technical promise but the
technical progress that that the main
kind has done
it's gigantic right i mean we
we have developed things that our brains
cannot even
understand in a way right because our
brains are still not
i mean as developed as as
maybe all the all the technical things
that that we use we don't know how it
affects us
but when it comes to art when it comes
to kind of like personal
uh spirit development or whatever
nothing almost has been done
it's just that it it has
to some extent also being our health in
general deteriorating like mentally
because we are more stressed than we
used to be and so on
so the question is whether uh we can use
then this technical development
to give us more time to do this other
type
of spiritual development and blah blah
blah but you know when i was thinking
about that three or five years ago i was
like
spiritual development what's that like
that's like ha ha nobody wants to talk
about that
but i don't think that we can continue
to be exposed
to this very advanced technology that we
still don't know how it completely
affects us and so on
without addressing kind of like this
type of development of no i don't want
to answer my email all the time
or my telephone makes me stressed and
stuff like that we don't talk too much
about that
and then robots will kind of like creep
on us and
scared
[Laughter]
but you're right like my daughter who's
three um
i mean she has robot you know she has
like a room in her house and to her it's
normal like you know
it gets stuck and then it's her job to
find where it is and it's completely
and it's completely okay you know if she
starts to talk to it
if she talks about it i mean and she
says i love my roomba can your roomba do
this
and it's not like you know the same for
the generation of our parents or
something like that to talk about
uh things that are not alive in the way
as they were alive
i mean they have this way of thinking
like in japan and korea
but in europe like you know loving your
robot or something like that
so i don't know if you know about it but
um there have been this
swedish tv has made
uh ekta real
people uh have you seen that
uh so it's um it's not
a film but it's like um it's like
several episodes it's like a syria
serial about a society
where we have robots that look exactly
like humans but are robots inside
okay kind of like issue grows yeah
exactly like that
and they address some of the issues uh
uh of of
how um humans like that that are very
much against saying like okay
you're a human and i like you blah blah
blah
but then how scared i get if i would get
to know that one of you
is is a robot that i would never accept
you and blah blah blah
but they address this issue of how as
humans we are
easy to how easy time we have to
actually just accept everything so
something that shocks us
something that we would say we would
never do it takes us
very little time to adapt so and
and and i think that that's an
interesting um aspect of us being humans
that
maybe we are scared at first but when we
see that it adds something
to the quality of life or something like
that we are able to actually accept it
so the acceptance aspect
of the the advanced technology
we may say that no i would never do that
or use that but as soon as you see that
that is actually to your benefit
no problem and this is what they have
been addressing oh i mean
this kind of like clash between
people that say no and then they see
that something is okay
they have love stories about loving your
robots and uh
yeah it's um it's in the public i mean
yeah i think there are some issues that
you laugh at right because they have
like a usb
way of kind of like
getting getting the energy and
everything but uh there are things that
that that are interesting too
good thank you