A Conversation with Diligent Robotics Co-Founder Andrea Thomaz | Austin Monthly
A Conversation with Diligent Robotics Co-Founder Andrea Thomaz
We caught up with the creator of Moxi, an autonomous AI-driven robot that’s revolutionizing health care in the age of COVID-19.
In the early 2000s, Andrea Thomaz abandoned her native Texas to pursue a Ph.D. in the nascent field of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nearly two decades later, the UT professor is a renowned social robotics expert with a myriad of accolades, including being named one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People” and serving on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Her latest (and most impressive) feat: starting Diligent Robotics, the AI company behind Moxi, an autonomous AI-driven robot that’s revolutionizing health care and aiding hospitals on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis.
How did you first get interested in robotics?
I got it from my dad. He was an engineer, so our whole family was kind of do-it-yourselfers. My maiden name is Lockerd, so we like to joke that my dad likes to “Lockerd” things. He’ll always fix it, but it may be a sprinkler system that has five switches that nobody in their right mind would be able to figure out—except for him. Our house and cars had all been Lockerded in some way or another [laughs]. That rubs off on you.
When did you make the leap to artificial intelligence?
After studying electrical engineering at UT and working at IBM, I went to grad school to study artificial intelligence. Back then, in the early 2000s, it was this totally new and uncharted territory. At its core, a lot of the scientific principles were the same, but over the last couple of decades, the tools and the algorithms have become more adept at being used in complicated environments. The older technology was what you’d call very “brittle.” It could be trained to recognize cats, for instance, but it would fail if it saw anything outside the examples it’d been programmed with.
What inspired you to create Diligent Robotics?
Upon my return to Austin, Vivian Chu, who was my Ph.D. student at the time, wanted to start a company. We’d talk about where we would have the most impact, which started as pie-in-the-sky conversations. But by 2017, we put our passion for pairing technology with human needs to the test. We realized that health care workers were the people we wanted to work alongside and help the most.
So what exactly does your robot, Moxi, do?
Nurses are asked to do a lot of busy work—running test samples to the lab, taking prescriptions to the pharmacy, time-consuming tasks that don’t make use of their clinical skill sets. That’s where Moxi comes in. Using machine learning technology, sensors, and cameras, Moxi can quickly map out the layout of a hospital and use its mechanized arm to perform tasks like moving supplies around and completing small deliveries. It sounds simple, but you need a whole algorithm in place to perceive every new environment, adjust Moxi’s arm motion, and achieve that task the way it’s supposed to be. It’s well worth the effort, though: Every time Moxi chips in, that allows nurses to stay by their patients.
Why did you decide to put a head on Moxi?
Eye gaze is a big way that humans read each other’s actions, and people look at robots the same way. So if Moxi is going down the hallway and is looking to the right, you know that’s where it’s headed next. Simple things like that ensure someone doesn’t have to stop what they’re doing and hesitate as they wonder what the robot is going to do next. Plus, Moxi flashes heart eyes at people sometimes and they like that [laughs].
How has COVID-19 impacted Moxi’s presence in hospitals?
A lot of what Moxi’s doing in hospitals today is making sure staff stay with their units and aren’t running around the building. With COVID, there’s just additional work that health care workers are now tasked with, a lot more PPEs that have to be delivered, lots more testing. Now more than ever, our frontline workers need to be present with their patients and efficient with their time. So, Moxi’s been spending much of the day delivering COVID test kits around the hospital and taking those tests back to the lab. Obviously, we didn’t anticipate this being a part of our work, but it’s been so important to step up where we can.
As a female leader in a predominantly male industry, how important is it for you to compel more women to go into STEM?
It’s always been important to me to show that a diversity of ideas around the table is something that we all, as a society, are going to benefit from. To the extent that I can help shed more light on that, I’m always excited to show people that there’s not just one way to get things done or one way to lead. Any chance I can, I want to show the younger generations that success stems from collaboration and a variety of experiences—that every door should be open to everyone.