Kate Saenko and Her Team Looks to Create a Robot for Recycling
Kate Saenko is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. She is also the founder and co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Research (AIR) initiative at the Hariri Institute for Computing. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence with a specific focus on dataset bias, adaptive machine learning, learning for image and language understanding, and deep learning. Recently, she decided to take her area of expertise and apply it to the recycling world.
Kate Saenko and her team have partnered with a group from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) to begin the incredible task of creating a robot that will sort and identify items that are trash or recyclable. Currently, this job of sorting through trash to identify what items are truly recyclable can only be done by the human eye and hand. Not only is this job dirty and unappealing, it poses health hazards to these workers as they are exposed to waste and toxins. Knowing that over 500,000 people in the US have this job, Kate and her team make it clear that their goal is to make the process more efficient but at the same time not displace workers from their jobs. They hope that robots can team up with employees to make the sorting process more efficient as well as make the lives of the workers easier and safer. The team faces a challenge of starting from scratch as the application of algorithms and robots to a field of recycling has not been done before. They hope to have a prototype in the next two to three years.
AIR is a research initiative focused on machine learning of intelligence. Researchers with the goal of creating intelligent systems collaborate to make new systems that perform functions similar to humans. The AIR initiative is a great way to meet other researchers and come together to share ideas and create.