Telepresence and cloud intelligence

Despite 100 years of advances in communications technology, most white-collar jobs are still done in person by people commuting to offices. Many of these jobs can now be done remotely by telepresence robots. Some jobs can be done better because people can switch quickly between several locations, or because different specialists can take turns working through the same robot. Jobs that involve idle time can be done more cheaply, because a large number of robots can be controlled by a smaller number of people. I’ll talk about the opportunity and technology we’re building.

Presenter(s)

Dr. Blackwell is the founder and CEO of Anybots Inc., a Silicon Valley startup developing next-generation teleoperated robots for use in a variety of settings, such as dangerous industrial jobs. They developed many new robots, including potentially the first humanoid robot that walks and balances in a truly dynamic way. He is also a partner in Y Combinator, a new kind of venture firm specializing in early stage startups. Previously he was a principal at Viaweb, maker of easy end-user e-commerce software, which was acquired by Yahoo to become Yahoo Store. As a grad student at Harvard, he worked on randomized network protocols and randomized compiler optimizations. He published in the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE Infocom, and Usenix. He also has done a number of recreational hacking projects and published the results on the web, such as the balancing scooter..