Ken Goldberg

William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Professor of Engineering, UC Berkeley and Chief Scientist, Ambi Robotics

Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley and an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist and popular public speaker on AI and robotics. Ken trains the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs in his research lab at UC Berkeley; he has published over 300 papers, 3 books, and holds 9 US Patents. Ken’s artwork has been featured in 70 art exhibits including the 2000 Whitney Biennial. He is a pioneer in technology and artistic visual expression, bridging the “two cultures” of art and science. With unique skills in communication and creative problem solving, invention, and thinking on the edge, Ken has presented over 600 invited lectures at events around the world.

 

  • Ken Goldberg Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

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  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

  • Ken Goldberg Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    Please Inquire

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

AI and Robots in the Roaring 2020's: A Post-Pandemic Surge in Productivity

Many fear that advances in AI will lead to massive job losses or human extinction. I’ll present a much more optimistic outlook based on history and science. In the decade after the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the world economy flourished with advances in electricity and ...

Many fear that advances in AI will lead to massive job losses or human extinction. I’ll present a much more optimistic outlook based on history and science. In the decade after the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the world economy flourished with advances in electricity and transportation. Today, the world is poised for similar growth based on advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. In the 2020’s, a new generation of robots will assist workers in warehouses, factories, agriculture, and healthcare. I’ll use images and video to illustrate recent advances where robots learn to: grasp unfamiliar objects, untangle cables, tend polyculture gardens, and manipulate surgical
needles. Rather than replacing workers or causing destruction, AI and robots are much more likely to enhance human productivity, collaboration, and creativity in the Roaring 2020’s.

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The Cutting Edge of Robot Surgery

To improve patient care, a new generation of robots is being developed to actively assist surgeons in the operating room.  These robots can autonomously perform tedious subtasks such as suturing and debridement to improve consistency and reduce fatigue, analogous to advances ...

To improve patient care, a new generation of robots is being developed to actively assist surgeons in the operating room.  These robots can autonomously perform tedious subtasks such as suturing and debridement to improve consistency and reduce fatigue, analogous to advances in automotive anti-skid braking and intelligent lane-keeping systems. New companies and labs are using Recent advances in AI and deep learning are being applied by researchers and companies worldwide to develop this new generation robots, which also opens the door to long-distance tele-surgery. I’ll present recent advances from our lab including novel hardware and software with applications to cutting, suturing, palpation, dissection, retraction, debridement and a recent result — “Superhuman Peg Transfer”, where a robot autonomously performs a standard surgical task with accuracy and speed on par with a surgeon and with significantly more consistency:

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The New Wave in Robot Grasping

Despite 50 years of research, robots remain remarkably clumsy, limiting their applications in home decluttering, warehouse order fulfillment, and robot-assisted surgery.  The First Wave of grasping research, still dominant, uses analytic methods based on screw theory and ...

Despite 50 years of research, robots remain remarkably clumsy, limiting their applications in home decluttering, warehouse order fulfillment, and robot-assisted surgery.  The First Wave of grasping research, still dominant, uses analytic methods based on screw theory and assumes exact knowledge of pose, shape, and contact mechanics. The Second Wave is empirical: purely data driven approaches which learn grasp strategies from many examples using techniques such as imitation and reinforcement learning with hyperparametric function approximation (Deep Learning).  The New Wave is based on hybrid methods that combine analytic models to bootstrap Deep Learning models, where data and code is exchanged via the Cloud using emerging advances in cloud computing and big data.  I’ll present our lab’s work on the Dexterity Network (Dex-Net), an emerging New Wave approach that allows robots to grasp a broad range of novel objects.

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Future Farming with Robots

Humans have grown food for over 10,000 years.  As the climate changes and the global population seeks fresh and healthy nutrition, advances in robots are being applied in agriculture.  This talk will review recent progress including John Deere’s use of drones to fine-...

Humans have grown food for over 10,000 years.  As the climate changes and the global population seeks fresh and healthy nutrition, advances in robots are being applied in agriculture.  This talk will review recent progress including John Deere’s use of drones to fine-tune fertilizer delivery and EarthSense mobile robots that roll beneath leaf canopies to closely monitor plant properties that optimize breeding.  I’ll share results from RAPID, a USDA-sponsored project developing Robot Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery, and two projects that incorporate art and research: TeleGarden (1995) where over 100,000 people remotely collaborated to tend a living garden, and AlphaGarden (2020), where simulation and measurements from a living garden are being combined to train a robot to sustain a diverse polyculture garden.  This talk will explore how the the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions can be extended by the AI Revolution.

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Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, Exoticism, Robots, and AI

Shortly after the 1918 pandemic, the word “robot” was coined in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords.  A century later, amid rising economic inequality and xenophobia, we are immersed in a new global pandemic.  In...

Shortly after the 1918 pandemic, the word “robot” was coined in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords.  A century later, amid rising economic inequality and xenophobia, we are immersed in a new global pandemic.  In parallel, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, fueled by governments, corporations, and venture capital, disrupt labor, trade, and political stability.  As claims are made about “superintelligence” and existential threats to humanity, new questions arise about the distinctions between humans and machines.

Asserting that “humanity still has a few good years left,” Goldberg draws on art and literature from Ovid’s Pygmalian to the Golem, through Von Kempelen’s “Mechanical Turk” (1770), E.T.A. Hoffman’s Sandman (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny (1919) and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley (1970), to contextualize our contemporary fear and fascination with AI.  Goldberg will also describe his own artwork that explores the boundary between the natural and the artificial, such as the Telegarden (1995-2004), a living garden tended by 100,000 visitors operating a robot over the Internet, and his new project, AlphaGarden (2020-), that challenges AI to a game with nature.

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Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Our Fear and Fascination with Robots

Engineers, animators, and designers apply the concept of the Uncanny Valley to technologies from AI to Robots to Siri.  In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay tracing the concept of the Uncanny back to the ...

Engineers, animators, and designers apply the concept of the Uncanny Valley to technologies from AI to Robots to Siri.  In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay tracing the concept of the Uncanny back to the Renaissance.   Goldberg illustrates this history with art  that explores the shifting borders between the digital and the natural, including his Emmy-nominated short doc film that explores our collective fear and fascination with robots, the most human of our machines.

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Musk vs. Zuck: Are AI and Robots a Threat...or an Opportunity?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed humans at Jeopardy and Go, and driverless cars are widely believed to be around the corner.  News articles claim we’re on the brink of a “Singularity” where robots will steal 50% of our jobs.  Are AI and Robots an ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed humans at Jeopardy and Go, and driverless cars are widely believed to be around the corner.  News articles claim we’re on the brink of a “Singularity” where robots will steal 50% of our jobs.  Are AI and Robots an existential threat to humans as Elon Musk warns?  Or is Mark Zuckerberg right in stating that humans have many good years ahead?  “Automation Anxiety” has a long history, with widespread pronouncements about the imminent loss of jobs to Automation in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s. Drawing on his experience as a robotics and AI research expert, Goldberg explores these issues in three parts: 1) What Isn’t New, 2) What Is New, and 3), How We Can Prepare. Ultimately, Goldberg reveals how new innovations will empower humans, not replace them, revealing the potential for new trends such as “Cloud Robotics”, and “Multiplicity”.

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Cultivating the Uncanny: Art, Fear, and Fascination with Technology

Engineers, animators, and designers apply the concept of the Uncanny Valley to technologies from AI to Robots to Siri.  In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay tracing the concept of the Uncanny back to the ...

Engineers, animators, and designers apply the concept of the Uncanny Valley to technologies from AI to Robots to Siri.  In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay tracing the concept of the Uncanny back to the Renaissance.   Goldberg illustrates this history with art  that explores the shifting borders between the digital and the natural, including his Emmy-nominated short doc film that explores our collective fear and fascination with robots, the most human of our machines.

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Brainstorming At A Global Scale

To brainstorm at the scale of social media, we can use techniques from an unlikely source: Robotics.  Goldberg presents recent results on social innovation and collective brainstorming work with the U.S. State Department, General Motors, and the State of California.

Putting the "Turing" into ManufacTuring: Recent Developments in Algorithmic Automation

Automation for manufacturing today is where computer technology was in the early 1960’s, a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions lacking a rigorous scientific methodology. CAD provides detailed models of part geometry. What’s missing is formal models of part behavior and ...

Automation for manufacturing today is where computer technology was in the early 1960’s, a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions lacking a rigorous scientific methodology. CAD provides detailed models of part geometry. What’s missing is formal models of part behavior and frameworks for the systematic design of automated systems that can feed, assemble, and inspect parts.  “Algorithmic Automation” introduces abstractions that allow the functionality of automation to be designed independent of the underlying implementation and can provide the foundation for formal specification and analysis, algorithmic design, and consistency checking.

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Too Close for Comfort?: AI, 5G, IoT, Robots, and Privacy

Prof. Goldberg will present recent advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and networking and the potential dangers they raise in terms of security and privacy.  Goldberg will illustrate these issues in the context of advances in audio, video/face recognition, and data...

Prof. Goldberg will present recent advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and networking and the potential dangers they raise in terms of security and privacy.  Goldberg will illustrate these issues in the context of advances in audio, video/face recognition, and data surveillance, including from his own research on robot learning, Freud’s concept of the Uncanny, and art projects including his Whitney Museum art installation and the concept of “Respectful Cameras”.

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About Keynote Speaker Ken Goldberg

Award-winning Artist, Roboticist, Filmmaker, and UC Berkeley Engineering Professor Ken Goldberg is a popular public speaker who combines compelling images and videos in dynamic presentations on emerging trends in Artificial Intelligence and Robots.

Ken trains the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs in his research lab at UC Berkeley; he has published over 300 papers in
robotics and social media and holds 8 US Patents.  His work has been cited in over 15,000 publications.  Ken is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Ambi Robotics.

Ken is a pioneer in technology and artistic visual expression, bridging the “Two Cultures” of Art and Science. With unique skills in communication and creative problem solving, invention, and thinking on the edge, Ken has presented over 600 keynote and invited lectures to audiences around the world at events such as the World Economic Forum, Aspen Ideas Festival, Amazon re:MARS, Google Zeitgeist, TEDx, Web 2.0, SXSW, MIT EmTech, and at MIT, Harvard, CMU, Stanford, Oxford, Technion, Google, Amazon, ATT, Autodesk, Cisco, Credit Lyonnais Asia, Deloitte, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Fidelity, Flextronics, Freeman Group, Fujitsu, General Electric, IBM, Intel, McKinsey, Oracle, Samsung, Siemens, Tata Communications, UBS, and Vodefone on the topics below.

Ken was awarded the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship from President Bill Clinton in 1995 and elected IEEE Fellow in 2005.  Ken and his students pioneer research in robot grasping, motion, and design for applications ranging from surgery to manufacturing to home automation to precision agriculture.  Ken’s artwork has appeared in 70 exhibits including the Whitney Biennial and he developed the first provably complete algorithm for part feeding and the first robot on the Internet.  Ken served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on
Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of: the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), Hybrid Wisdom Labs, the Moxie Film Studio, the African Robotics Network (AFRON), and Founding Director of UC Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series. Ken’s projects are regularly featured on television, radio, and in publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, MIT Tech
Review, BBC, Fast Company, der Spiegel, and Rolling Stone.

Testimonials

“Thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise of the future of robotics with the Cisco research community. Your energy and engagement with the audience made it an exceptional experience for all involved!”

Megan Brogan

Program Manager, Research & Open Innovation, Cisco, 2015

“It was a pleasure having you here and listening to your great presentation and panel discussion! Robotics is clearly a fascinating topic!”

Hannes Ametsreiter

CEO, Vodafone Germany, 2016

“Ken’s talk was of the best presentations this year. Clear, visionary, entertaining, passionate, direct, thought provoking, and fun!”

Michael Burz

CEO, Enzinc Inc, 2017

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