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Claire Cain Miller
One of the reasons so few women work in tech is that few choose to study computer science or engineering. Only 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women, down from 37 percent in 1985.
At a few top college programs, though, that appears to be changing.
At Carnegie Mellon University, 40 percent of incoming freshmen to the School of Computer Science are women, the largest group ever. At the University of Washington, another technology powerhouse, women earned 30 percent of computer science degrees this year. At Harvey Mudd College, 40 percent of computer science majors are women, and this year, women represented more than half of the engineering graduates for the first time.
These examples provide a road map for how colleges can help produce a more diverse group of computer science graduates. They also help answer a controversial question: Does the substance of computer science instruction need to be adjusted to attract women, or does recruitment and mentorship? It’s an important question because tech companies have so many jobs to fill, and because computer science skills have become necessary in almost every other industry, too.
via Some Universities Crack Code in Drawing Women to Computer Science – NYTimes.com.
The math that explains why that is Omohundro calls the formula for optimal rational decision making. It speaks to the way that any rational being will make decisions in order to maximize rewards and lowest possible cost. It looks like this:
In the above model, A is an action and S is a stimulus that results from that action. In the case of utility function, action and stimulus form a sort of feedback loop. Actions that produce stimuli consistent with fulfilling the program’s primary goal will result in more of that sort of behavior. That will include gaining more resources to do it.
For a sufficiently complex or empowered system, that decision-making would include not allowing itself to be turned off, take, for example, a robot with the primary goal of playing chess.
“When roboticists are asked by nervous onlookers about safety, a common answer is ‘We can always unplug it!’
But imagine this outcome from the chess robot’s point of view,” writes Omohundro. “A future in which it is unplugged is a future in which it cannot play or win any games of chess. This has very low utility and so expected utility maximisation will cause the creation of the instrumental subgoal of preventing itself from being unplugged. If the system believes the roboticist will persist in trying to unplug it, it will be motivated to develop the subgoal of permanently stopping the roboticist,” he writes.
In other words, the more logical the robot, the more likely it is to fight you to the death.
via If the Robots Kill Us, It’s Because It’s Their Job – Patrick Tucker – The Atlantic.
OTA’s first foray into the world of Botball Robotics was during it’s inaugural year of 2011-2012. A huge thanks for Mr. Katz for making this wonderful compilation!
10 OTA students participating in 3 teams qualified for entry to the next level of robotics competition at the Southern California FLL Championship Tournament on Sunday Dec. 2nd. Representing team Ospreys were Ethan, Brian, RT & Matthew. Representing the first all-girls robotics team for OTA was team Major Pain consisting of Kiki, Maddy, Lupe & Zoe. Xavier & Asia competed on the last team comprised of students from their local neighborhood. In order to advance Continue reading
In our sincere efforts to have students apply knowledge gained in our math and science classes, students in the 6th grade have been designing, building and programming semi-autonomous robots. Full autonomous robots are like robots in the Terminator movies….so we avoid those! Instead students have been on a fast paced roller coaster ride to develop bots that have offensive strategies as simple as pushing to more complex strategies such as pulsing mini appendages to snag or flip opponents. Simultaneously students have also develop strategies to stay on the Sumo Wresting board using both digital “touch” sensors and analog “color” sensors. Their appearance at last weekends annual RoboExpo continues to excite and intrigue the wide variety of participants who came and our students had fun testing their robots on a significantly different playing surface.
