TRGS hosted a Happy Hour at Posse East where visiting potential graduate students interested in Robotics could mingle with current Texas Robotics graduate students.
Category Archives: Events
Celebrating Robotics at UT’s STEM Girl Day 2024
TRGS hosted a demo on computer vision for UT’s STEM Girl Day! There were many children (and parents) who came by to learn about the use of computer vision with robots. Participants could hold objects up to a webcam and see if the Python algorithm correctly identified the items.
Fall 23 Trivia
TRGS Fall ’23 Picnic
Fall ’23 Second Annual Texas Robotics Graduate Students Robot Halloween Costume Contest
TRGS got spooky with Trick-or-Treating this Fall. Our treats — candy. The tricks — awesome submissions to the robot costume contest. See y’all next year!
1st Place – How to Pay off Med School Debt by Sheela and Jeff from ARTS (red tube man)
2nd Place – Dobby (Spooky Version) by Diana, Carson, Asha, and Geethika from LWR (ghost)
3rd Place – Mada(nota)gascar by Caleb, Kevin, Ithza, Daniel, and Christina from NRG (giraffe)
TRGS Celebrates Graduating Students
TRGS Spring Picnic Recap
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Thank you to everyone who joined us at the IM Fields for our Spring picnic! The rain played a belated April Fools’ joke and threatened us with cloudy skies but thankfully never materialized. TRGS members played games (soccer, volleyball, spikeball, and cornhole), ate food, and grabbed some awesome burnt orange TRGS shirts. See you at the next one!
TRGS Supports Successful STEM Girl Day
STEM Girl Day allows young girls to explore STEM activities with STEM members from UT. TRGS supported Texas Robotics in tours, demos, and a robot building activity.
Loose Threads: Design Thinking for the Last Inch of Innovation
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Join TRGS on February 9th (3:30-4:30 pm in the AHG Seminar Room) for this invited talk by Dr. Elliott Hauser and Dr. Samantha Shorey from Good Systems!
“Loose Threads” is a collaborative conversation that engages participants in imagining and redesigning the systems where technology is embedded. What are the compromises, considered actions and embedded values we impart on the path to automation? How might we hold open the possibility of meaningful work at its edge?
The elimination of human labor underlies many conversations about automation. Yet, every innovation begets new types of work that are constituent of its success. Situated at the human-technology frontier, there are new jobs made possible by automation. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, calls these the jobs that “machines dream up.” Here human collaboration and oversight increases, not decreases, in value. Yet, this oversight can come at a grueling cost. Dystopian futures are already present in the seemingly automated places where human hands still assemble the iPhone and human eyes moderate online content. When we look more closely at automated processes, we begin to see both the glimmering and dark future of technology work.
Dr. Samantha Shorey (Assistant Professor, Communication) is a design researcher who studies how users contribute to the making, modification and maintenance of new technologies. Her work engages overlooked stories of innovation to recognize the contributions of women to technology design—both presently and in the past. Dr. Shorey is co-lead of the UT Good Systems project “Living and Working with Robots” and PI of an NSF-funded project examining how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are being adopted and adapted by essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.