Founding SophiaDAO & Hanson Robotics Research.
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I continued to work with Hanson Robotics and in collaboration with the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) & SingularityNet we’re working to develop the new Sophia platform.
The Sophia 2020 platform is a framework for human-like embodied cognition that we’ve developed to help advance Sophia’s expression, manipulation, perception and design. Our work with Sophia will act as a standard for understanding human-robot interactions and be used during autism treatment and medical depression studies.
We recently presented our poster on our integrative platform (including mechanics, design, and control system) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting. Check out the full poster here and below 👇🏼
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I worked on running our algorithm (a closed-loop vision-based manipulation technique) for various grasping tasks in simulation and will eventually be testing it on Sophia.
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I wrote a blog going deeper into our research and what we're building. Check it out on Hanson Robotic's blog page!
🔗Research Blog
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SophiaDAO
Alongside this work, I'm working with David Hanson and Ben Goertzel to co-found SophiaDAO. This organization will act as governance guidance that will operate within the regulations of EU, UN, and other structures of legal nations to guide Sophia and other AGI initiatives evolution. This will be a collaboration of interdisciplinary experts and smart-robot enthusiasts that will approve and select key aspects of Sophia’s development. I'll be publishing more on this soon as our work becomes public!
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Publishing Research on Cheaper Prosthetics with San Jose State University.
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I'm working with Dr. Barez and William Escobar to develop an affordable and easily accessible novel prosthetic arm that reduces the cost of prosthetics from $10,000 to $700 on average.
Using V-REPs motion planning and object grasping scene, I simulated a Jaco arm for manipulation tasks including dynamic particles, motion planning and inverse kinematics features. The model is trained and run on an algorithm that I reproduced very similar to QT-Opt. Check it out!
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Demo of Simulation
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I wrote a blog that goes deeper on how I built this and some of the research behind QT-Opt.
🔗Research Blog
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I used the anthropomorphic hand from the SHAP test suite to test another manipulation experiment using DDPG to pick up everyday objects.
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Next Steps:
- We're working to test this algorithm on our custom made prosthetic hand CAD design.
- We will be testing all the hardware and control system on a 3D printed prosthetic arm.
- Our research was accepted to be presented at GSEMME 2021 where we will be presenting a poster.
- Alongside the poster, we will be releasing a pre-print paper on arxiv in a few days to get feedback from the community and we have submitted our work to IMECE, IROS and RSS for publication.
- I'll be sharing our research paper in the next newsletter :)
General Update: I'm in talks with the team at Kindred.ai, Haddington Dynamics to potentially work on furthering other research with them on novel neural net approaches this summer and HKU later this year. More on this soon!
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Pivoting and Finishing Pilots @ Voltx.
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Voltx is a project I'm building using machine learning to accelerate the testing process of batteries and supercapacitors in labs. We're working to build on our MVP to deliver to our pilot companies. After we do this, we're hoping to expand out of the supercapacitor market and to pivot to another industry/market where there is a greater impact + more long-term play for us.
Our main progress update is:
- Onboarded a team member to help us with research to pivot our idea. It's overall been a lot of fun researching other problem areas in renewables, batteries and we're learning a lot.
- Hired an ML contractor who will be supporting us in building out the technical side of our model.
- Made progress to move our partnership forward with 1-2 companies. Wrapping up our pilots soon.
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👉 I've been looking into understanding the value chain of batteries, battery recycling, electronics and renewables like solar panels. If you know anyone who is an expert in these fields, I'd love to connect with them to chat further! Any intros here would be greatly appreciated.
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Advising/Building Bluesky (Twitter) and LF Public Health Frameworks.
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Twitter has been funding a small independent team of open source engineers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media called BlueSky. I've been working with a few collaborators to help develop standards around Solid and how that can be integrated into this.
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LF Public Health is doing some really interesting work building privacy-preserving Verifiable Credentials to help Public Health Authorities combat issues related to vaccine credentials with COVID and future epidemics. I've been informally advising the team on various different approaches we can take with building wallets and integrating frameworks like Solid.
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Joining On Deck Founders Fellowship.
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The On Deck Founders Fellowship is a program that brings together an incredible group of founders who are in the early stages of building their next startup. I recently joined the On Deck Founders Fellowship Program as part of cohort 8. The experience has been insanely valuable so far from getting to meet founders working on different problems, learning about the process of starting a company and working with others to build projects!
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- FastTrack: Female Founders get only 2.2% of all venture capital. During the On Deck Build Weekend, I worked with a team to solve this problem by developing FastTrack which is a community where female founders can:
- Start private conversations with other Female founders
- Find vetted Female investors and Female Founders
- Share lessons learned and challenges with a closed and trusted community
In the first few days, we're on track (no pun intended) to get about 100 beta users that will join the network and test it out. Our work is also posted on ProductHunt which you can check out here (upvotes appreciated!).
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- TKS Success Team: I supported TKS in kick-starting an internal workflow to measure and improve the quality of content and work being produced in the program.
- University Applications: Wrapped up all my university applications for next year and now waiting to hear back from them!
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📍 "How Two Teens Co-Founded an Energy Storage Product". My work with Voltx was featured in WeAreFLIK's Blog. We talk about our journey finding the problem and building the solution.
📍"Alishba Imran is making robots more human". I spoke on the Work in Progress Podcast about my research in robotics, the future of AGI and humanoids.
📍"Machine Learning Is The Future And Ms Alishba Imran Is Already There!". My feature in The Daily Scrum News about my journey and work in machine learning.
📍"Women at the Forefront of Science & Advancing Healthcare". Re-Work featured some of my advice for other women who want to advance in science and technology.
📍I will be speaking at the One Tech World Virtual Conference on May 11-13th about my work and research in robotics + machine learning. You can get your tickets now to attend. If you'd like to attend and can't get a ticket, please also let me know and I can try to get you one!
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I really like this blog by Julian Shapiro called 'What to work on'. It made me think deeper about the line between being ‘process focused’ vs. ‘results focused’ and how that affects your decisions. As well as the importance of setting long-term goals that help you develop a longer-term vision for your life.
From spending more time reflecting on what I enjoy doing the most, I realized:
I thrive in environments where I can identify and breakdown fundamental problems in our world (particularly in spaces like healthcare & energy). I want to develop technical systems or frameworks that allow me to execute a solution to create a pivotal shift in these spaces. To optimize for this, I want to continue diving deeper into problem areas I've identified and to further develop my technical and execution skills through working with people in environments where I can learn from the best.
If you have any thoughts, feedback or different perspectives on how I'm thinking about this then please do reach out and I'd love to chat further!
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I set a goal for myself to read a new book at least once every month. Currently, I'm reading Richard Branson's autobiography which has been a very good read. He talks about Virgin, how he built the company and the importance of always having fun regardless of what you work on.
If you have suggestions for other books you recommend reading, please send them my way!
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Thanks for catching up with me! If we haven't spoken in a while please do reach out. As always, I appreciate you following along on my journey and I'll 'see' you in the next update✌🏼
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