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Podcast: Missy Cummings: Artificial intelligence is artificial and not intelligent

Damian Cristodero — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 15:46:13 +0000

Podcast: Missy Cummings: Artificial intelligence is artificial and not intelligent Damian Cristodero Wed, 01/25/2023 - 10:46

Missy Cummings, one of the country’s first female fighter pilots and director of �鶹��Ƶ’s Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Translational AI, calls herself a tech futurist, charged with making tech work better and safer. In a conversation with �鶹��Ƶ President Gregory Washington, Cummings is unflinching in her critique of AI’s strengths, weaknesses, and shortcomings, as well as that of humans. There is a lot to like about AI, Cummings says, but she calls out bad tech where she sees it, including in the vision systems of self-driving cars and Tesla’s Autopilot.

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Intro (00:04):
Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story: all make up the fabric that is �鶹��Ƶ, where taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates, and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by �鶹��Ƶ President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

President Gregory Washington (00:26):
Missy Cummings is from a small town in Tennessee, where as she said few people finish college or even leave home. Her biggest challenge, she said, was finding the courage to go out into the unknown. All I can say is mission accomplished. Cummings, a professor in �鶹��Ƶ's Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science helped blaze a trail for women's equality in America's armed forces as a naval officer and as one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots. That's right: First female fighter pilots. That distinction came despite her facing discrimination and resentment from her male colleagues. She chronicled those events in her book "Hornet's Nest." Now the director of �鶹��Ƶ Center for Robotics Autonomous Systems and Translational AI, Cummings research interests include the application of artificial intelligence and safety critical systems, human systems engineering, and the social impact of technology. One of her first challenges at �鶹��Ƶ is to create a new educational program in the design and development of artificial intelligence. Cummings has asked the hard questions about the fundamentals of autonomous transportation while taking some jabs at bad technology, including Elon Musk, Tesla Autopilot, which we will discuss-- I'm an owner and so we can have a lot to discuss on this issue. She has been a guest of 60 Minutes, the Colbert Report, and the Daily Show with John Stewart. She also has a goal of hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. Dr. Cummings, welcome to the show and welcome to �鶹��Ƶ with the start of the spring 2023 semester.

Missy Cummings (02:21):
It is so good to be at both places. Thank you.

President Gregory Washington (02:24):
For those of you who may not know, Dr. Cummings and I have a long and storied history. I've actually tried to hire her on multiple occasions and I was ecstatic when we were able to get here, here with the help of Dean Ken Ball and others when we were able to get her here at George �鶹��Ƶ. So how far have you gotten on that Appalachian Trail?

Missy Cummings (02:45):
Oh my goodness. Well, I've only been doing it 20 years and you know, I have an attention span problem, so I can only go out for a few days at a time. So, you know, I'm about halfway. I still have a lot in Maine, New Hampshire up north. I'm pretty much done with the south though.

President Gregory Washington (03:01):
Nice. Well, you know, I am a hiker kind of guy in Virginia. There are some significant parts of that trail. I hear that there is the rollercoaster section. Have you done that section of the trail?

Missy Cummings (03:13):
Yeah, I'd knocked out the rollercoaster section a long time ago, but I will tell you, it was just, um, over COVID when, uh, down near Lynchburg, I went up in the wintertime and I took my Jeep and because I feel like I'm a fighter pilot, I could do anything and there's nothing I can't do. And I almost drove off the side of the mountain in my Jeep 'cause I hit a spot of ice that that was under the road surface and you couldn't see it. And I almost died. And, uh, whew. So Virginia is probably not the rollercoaster section that killed me, but over down by Lynchburg, that was dangerous.

President Gregory Washington (03:46):
There's just so much we could talk about and I want to jump in to a whole lot of it. So I wanna start with your time in the military because that was so defining for you in terms of your path now.

Missy Cummings (03:58):
Absolutely.

President Gregory Washington (03:58):
So you were in the military from 1988 through 99.

Missy Cummings (04:02):
That's correct.

President Gregory Washington (04:02):
So when did you start flying fighter jets?

Missy Cummings (04:05):
Well, I went through flight school--the first couple of years when you're a baby pilot, you, you fly propellers and then you fly a couple of different kind of jets. So I didn't become a full-fledged jet pilot until 1990, and it's at that time that I forwarded deployed to the Philippines.

President Gregory Washington (04:21):
Nice.

Missy Cummings (04:21):
And, and I was flying a four echoes back then.

President Gregory Washington (04:23):
Oh, you're flying a fours?

Missy Cummings (04:25):
Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. I'm a real man.

President Gregory Washington (04:27):
<laugh>. So are you qualified to fly any other aircraft?

Missy Cummings (04:30):
Well, I flew F-18s as well. I then, when I became an official fighter pilot when I was in the Philippines, I was an aggressor pilot. So if you ever saw Top Gun 1, that's sort of what we did in the Philippines. We were pretending to be bad guys. And because I was a woman and at that time, women couldn't fly in combat, we just trained the men who were coming over to deploy in Iraq. And so we got to train the men to try to defend themselves. And it wasn't until a few years later that then the combat exclusion law was repealed. And that's when I, because I had already been doing the mission, I was one of the most qualified women to become a fighter pilot because I'd been doing those missions. That's when I rolled over to the F-18.

President Gregory Washington (05:09):
You know, <laugh>, I bring this up, I literally two weeks ago, just saw Top Gun 2 for the first time. I plan on seeing it again. Anything realistic about those Top Gun movies?

Missy Cummings (05:20):
The flying scenes are amazing, but it's not at all realistic. Right. I mean, the, the bottom line is these planes are so expensive that if you're getting that close to them, it's just too dangerous. You can't afford to lose the a hundred million dollar copy of the aircraft. And that's not even including weapons. And so there's a lot that goes on with the movies about the flying scenes that I think are not that realistic.

President Gregory Washington (05:41):
Oh so this, that whole one where he flies through the middle of the formation of the two aircraft, that probably wouldn't happen. That what you're saying?

Missy Cummings (05:47):
I mean, a lot of what happens at Top Gun you'd get kicked out for if you actually did that in real life. I, I. But they do a good job of capturing the spirit of what it means to be a fighter pilot.

President Gregory Washington (05:57):
No, I understand. I understand. You did a presentation a while back where you spoke about how, despite being an ultra trained and sophisticated pilot on takeoffs and landings in the F 18, you and all pilots are pretty much taken out of the equation as the plane flies itself at that point. You also wrote an extensive paper on the use of autonomous and automated weapons. Can you talk a little bit about that from an autonomy perspective? How much the person actually does and how much is involved in the actual technology of the plane itself?

Missy Cummings (06:28):
Yeah, I think these are really great questions, especially as autonomy and artificial intelligence continues to advance. So when I was flying, when I was transitioning from the A-4 to the F-18, one of the things that I found amazing was that when you were launched off the front of the aircraft carrier in an F-18, you had to show everyone on the carrier that you were not touching anything. You were not allowed to fly the plane. It was a computer program, it could fly itself off the front of the carrier just fine. The problem was that if you touched anything, you were likely gonna set up some pilot--induced oscillations that were not gonna be recoverable. And in fact, lots of people died this way. So this is why, you know, I felt that was really unnerving and that was really the beginning of me starting to wonder whether or not I should be doing something else, like going into academia. When I looked around the aircraft carrier and we weren't allowed to touch anything on takeoff because we would only screw it up. The planes always, always, always landed better than we did. Humans, we loved it--

President Gregory Washington (07:25):
Always?

Missy Cummings (07:26):
By, by that time, I mean the early days of automated landings, it was a bit sketchy. But by the late nineties and 2000, I mean, the planes are, computers can respond so much faster than we can as humans. We just can't process information as quickly on those kinds of jobs that the computer on the plane can.

President Gregory Washington (07:45):
Okay, hold on now. You are sitting in hundred millions of dollars worth of aircraft and you're on the aircraft carrier and they tell you don't touch nothing on takeoff.

Missy Cummings (07:58):
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (07:59):
The computer will handle everything.

Missy Cummings (08:00):
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (08:00):
And you're okay with that?

Missy Cummings (08:01):
Well, I didn't say it was okay with it, but it's what you do to stay alive. Right? I mean, it's very unnerving. It it is unnerving. And it's unnerving to watch the plane land itself always better than you can. You know, most of the really bad accidents on an aircraft carrier happen at 3:00 AM after a pilot's been out doing a mission, you're exhausted. You know, it's night, it's hard to see. And so that's a--

President Gregory Washington (08:24):
But if the plane is landing, why would you worry?

Missy Cummings (08:26):
Well, that's why you want it. Right? Because we have a lot fewer accidents now that the automation is at least assisting, if not doing it outright. I do think one of the things that people don't really get is don't be aghast at what I'm telling you about what's happening on a air, on a, on a military jet. It's happening to you every day when you fly commercial. Pilots only touch the stick for about three to seven minutes out of any flight, and it's on takeoff. Most of the time you're landing, you are being landed by a computer. And one of the reasons why the airlines locked it--

President Gregory Washington (08:57):
So, and even during the actual trajectory of the flight.

Missy Cummings (09:01):
Oh yeah. It's all automated.

President Gregory Washington (09:02):
They're not, they're not touching the stick.

Missy Cummings (09:03):
They're babysitting.

President Gregory Washington (09:04):
Well, let me ask you this. So you're flying, you hit turbulence, you bounce around for a few minutes and then you hear the ominous voice of the captain comes on and he says, or she says, we hit a little rough spot here and we're gonna glide down to smoother air. Is that the pilot taking over then?

Missy Cummings (09:19):
You know, it's kind of a hybrid. So the pilot's talking to air traffic control, getting a better spot. And then what they're doing is, like you're programming in your GPS, they're saying, okay, descend and maintain flight level 3 1 0 at an air speed of blahdi blah. Right. So they're just programming it in.

President Gregory Washington (09:34):
Okay. And then the airplane just,

Missy Cummings (09:36):
And the airplane, the airplane does it so much smoother. And indeed, one of the things that we've realized on landings and just flight in general is, first of all, if you let the computer fly, we save an amazing amount of fuel because pilots are just rougher on the controls. And so it's much more smooth when you let the automation do it. And it even saves on the tires. If You let the automation land the plane, they don't have to change out the tires as often.

President Gregory Washington (10:03):
That is so amazing. <laugh>. Wow.

Missy Cummings (10:06):
But, but let me tell you this, I would never get into a self-driving car that any of my students programmed. I'd fly in an aircraft a program, but I wouldn't get into a car.

President Gregory Washington (10:14):
We're gonna talk about that. I have never done any programming for aircraft relative to autonomy, but I have done a fair bit for automobiles, including a, just a couple of years ago on a project that we just completed on an autonomous dragster. And it, even going straight at high speeds is non-trivial. So I I I got a whole bunch of questions for you in that regard, but you mentioned that it was stressful, this whole idea of letting the plane land itself. I guess the human part of you wants to just take the stick and guide it down. And I assume at some point you have to take into account the fact that, you know, maybe you have a malfunction in a chip or the computer is not working properly and you have to land the aircraft. So I assume that at some point in time in training, you physically have to land on a carrier just so that you got the confidence that you can do it. Right?

Missy Cummings (11:07):
Well, and indeed airline pilots have to do the same thing. They have to land so many, so often to stay qualified, basically to stay up-to-date with your skillset. But indeed, you've hit on probably one of the biggest problems that we're facing in aviation right now. How much skill do you lose for the length of time that you let automation do it? And then how do we make sure that people keep their skillsets up even in the face of increasing automation. And the Asiana air crash, several years ago in San Francisco, there was a crash where there was a whole cockpit full of pilots and off-time pilots. And all of them missed the fact that, because the automation wasn't working that day they, you know, I think there were like five or more pilots in this cockpit and it still crashed and killed a lot of people in San Francisco. And that's because their skillset had eroded to the point that they didn't really even know how to fly the aircraft in the good old fashioned way. So I think there is a push and pull about either, and there's a lot of parallels to driving, like either the airplane can do it all the time with very high reliabilities, or you need to make sure that the human stays in the loop every so often. And now the FAA has to mandate the people get in and land every so often to keep that skillset up.

President Gregory Washington (12:23):
So talk to me about warfare. What is that like in an age of semi-autonomous systems? Is it closer to a video game?

Missy Cummings (12:31):
Oh, yeah.

President Gregory Washington (12:31):
Or, or is it closer to what we saw in Top Gun?

Missy Cummings (12:35):
I think it's kind of a mix. The reality is, is that there's a lot of automation that's finding its way into the cockpit. And one of the favorite stories I like to tell, and I told this in my book, is about a guy's call sign Spider. That's not really call sign. I changed it to protect the not-so-innocent. But when you're practicing missiles and you get the radar going, you actually would maneuver the airplane into an envelope. And if you got everything right, the envelope was right, the distance was right, the speed was right. And you would get these gigantic letters in your HUD shoot, shoot. You know, you'd pull the trigger and if you're on the test range, a missile would come off the rails and it would be at a static target. No problem. But there was a case where there was a squadron and they were deployed live over, you know, somewhere in the Middle East and Spider was coming back with his commanding officer.

Missy Cummings (13:22):
So that's be like me and you flying. And then they decided they had a little extra gas. And so they were gonna do a, a little one v. One top gun thing. They were gonna practice, pretend fight each other. But because they were coming back from a live area, they both had weapons on their plane.

President Gregory Washington (13:37):
So they had real weapons.

Missy Cummings (13:38):
Real weapons. But you can put the plane in simulate mode. So even if you have weapons and you pull the trigger, nothing happens, or you can leave it in live mode. And so when they went feet wet, which is when you go from the land to the water, they were supposed to go into simulated mode, but Spider got distracted and he forgot to push that button.

President Gregory Washington (13:56):
Oh.

Missy Cummings (13:57):
And so then they.

President Gregory Washington (13:57):
I know where this is going.

Missy Cummings (13:58):
So then they take a split, they come at each other and Spider's young, I mean the young guys usually have better reaction time. So he was able to get a bite onto the, his commanding officer, which means that he got to the, a good shot position first, and he lines up and he gets that amazing compelling shoot, shoot, shoot. And he shoots and a missile comes off the rail and then the planes tattletale on you. That's how you can't even lie anymore because as soon as a weapon leaves the planes, the video camera turns on. So it's like the police body cam is gonna turn on and make sure that it records everything bad you did. And so that you can actually see in this video, the missile go after his commanding officer, the commanding officer, because it was a heat seeking missile, he didn't have any of his systems on. He didn't even know this thing was in the air. And so you can see the missile gets like literally like inches from his tailpipe and then it just falls out of the air. It just didn't have enough juice to blow his commanding officer up. So the next thing you know, they have to come back to the carrier.

President Gregory Washington (14:51):
Wait, wait. So why, why did that happen? Was it just luck?

Missy Cummings (14:54):
Just luck. Just luck.

President Gregory Washington (14:55):
Just dumb luck.

Missy Cummings (14:56):
He took the shot on the very edge of the envelope and the missile just did not have enough gas to get there. So.

President Gregory Washington (15:01):
Oh my goodness.

Missy Cummings (15:01):
It's burning like a, and then it just kind of like a Bugs Bunny cartoon falls outta the sky. But then they have to come back land on the carrier. And so when you see a fighter jet and one missile's on one side of the plane and there's a missing one on the other one, it's not like you could say, uh, I don't know what happened. So, so he had to fess up.

President Gregory Washington (15:18):
What happened to him?

Missy Cummings (15:19):
In the old days, he probably would've been kicked out. But I think that they realized, that was the big time of the military was like, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't have these shoot cues that are so compelling because it's making people respond in a video game-like environment instead of taking the time to actually think about, is this something that I need to be doing? And so things have changed since then, but it's a good story to indicate humans under stress and battle even, that wasn't even a real battle. Right. He's just excited and he was gonna be able to quote unquote, you know, fake kill his commanding officer. And he almost did.

President Gregory Washington (15:50):
He almost real killed him.

Missy Cummings (15:51):
That's right.

President Gregory Washington (15:52):
So we hear about these patriot missile systems now in the public. They're hearing a lot about this autonomous aerial vehicles. But the reality is, in a non-military sense, the deployment of UAVs is probably a thousand, 10,000 to one relative to what we're seeing in the military. I mean, these things are being used all over the place. Are you doing any work or working on any applications, uh, that are non-military?

Missy Cummings (16:17):
Oh, I haven't done dedicated military drone work for a long time. There was a point in history where you could see the tide turn from anti-drone sentiments because of military to pro-drone sentiments. That year was 2013. And I had been working really hard to try to socialize the idea that drones would not be just a military platform, that they had a lot of good. And I was trying to socialize in America the idea that these would be cargo planes one day. And so I got invited to go on the Daily Show with John Stewart. I recommend everyone go look at this clip 'cause it's hilarious. 'cause he is going after me for basically being part of the war machine. And I'm trying to explain to him that these are going to be delivery aircraft in the future. You know? And he and I had a good repartee of going back and forth about were these things really killer robots or are there some good to this.

Missy Cummings (17:14):
And that that was 2013. And what's amazing is 10 years later it's a done deal. Right, right. And then many years--

President Gregory Washington (17:19):
They're everywhere.

Missy Cummings (17:20):
That's right. Everywhere. And I've been to Timbo, Africa using drones to follow elephants around. They have a really hard time of keeping track of their elephants and making sure the poachers aren't getting them. So we could use drones for those applications. And then recently I finished a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, looking at how we defend against drones in prisons, right. Because now one of the problems that we have is that drones are putting contraband into prison yards. And so now we were trying to come up using some artificial intelligence with ways to defend against the drones. And I think what was interesting--

President Gregory Washington (17:57):
There's a way, it's called a shotgun

Missy Cummings (17:58):
<laugh>

President Gregory Washington (17:59):
<laugh>.

Missy Cummings (18:01):
Yes. It turns out, do you know you're not allowed to do that? The FAA says don't do it. Right.

President Gregory Washington (18:05):
So you can't shoot.

Missy Cummings (18:06):
You can't, even if there's one hovering over your house, technically it's illegal for you to shoot a drone hovering over your house.

President Gregory Washington (18:12):
Really? I guess that's right. Because the property above your home, is it?

Missy Cummings (18:17):
That's correct.

President Gregory Washington (18:18):
25 feet and higher,

Missy Cummings (18:20):
No, it's like one inch.

President Gregory Washington (18:21):
But that is not your property, actually. It's

Missy Cummings (18:23):
Not, it's not your property. And fa a doesn't want you shooting things because they don't know where the drone is gonna go.

President Gregory Washington (18:28):
Oh, well, not only that, you shoot and then if you miss the projectile lands somewhere, it does come back down.

Missy Cummings (18:35):
So, so my advice is, if you're worried about that, just get a big old light and put it on top of your house and direct they, they can't, that'll totally screw the system. So there's lots of passive ways that we can defend against these things.

President Gregory Washington (18:45):
So you, you would come up with the, the technical way to defend against them?

Missy Cummings (18:49):
Oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah.

President Gregory Washington (18:49):
As opposed to the, you know, the good old American way. <laugh>, shoot it down. Shoot it down.

Missy Cummings (18:54):
Okay. Well there's part of me that really wants to do that. Like, I didn't say you couldn't use a slingshot.

President Gregory Washington (18:58):
<laugh> exactly. Okay, I hear you. So let's switch gears a little bit. There's a lot of talk these days about Elon Musk with the whole Twitter issue and him purchasing Twitter, but that has spilled over to Tesla. I'm a both a Tesla owner and a Tesla stock owner, have been for quite some time and have seen, uh, <laugh> the value of my Tesla shares decrease dramatically over the last year. So talk to me about your challenges with Elon Musk.

Missy Cummings (19:29):
So, I mean, it's hard for me to say that I have a war going with one of the richest men on the planet, right. Because it's only his perception that that's the case. I'm a big tech futurist.

President Gregory Washington (19:41):
Right.

Missy Cummings (19:42):
Uh, that's my job is to try to make tech work. It's not to stop tech. It's to help it get better. And I've been a big fan of SpaceX for a long time. As far as Teslas, I think they're great cars. I think that certainly they're very crash worthy. After you saw that Tesla go down that cliff and everybody survived, I'm like, you know, that thing has a good cage. That, that is a solid car.

President Gregory Washington (20:04):
Yeah. Because it's unibody construction.

Missy Cummings (20:06):
That's right. So I am not anti-Tesla, but like I will tell you, and there's many people in the drone world that know this, and in the driving world and in the AR/VR world--augmented reality, virtual reality world: I just really hate bad tech. And if you've got some bad tech that's really dangerous, I'm gonna call you out on it because that is my job to make safe good tech. And the problem, and I hope that you're listening to me, is,

President Gregory Washington (20:34):
Oh, actually I hope he's not listening, but keep going. <laugh>

Missy Cummings (20:36):
Do not drive your Teslas on autopilot or full self-driving without paying full and absolute attention, and keeping your hands on the wheel.

President Gregory Washington (20:45):
So two things I I I will highlight to you: I can't help it, I'm an engineer, right. I put mine in, uh, auto drive mode all the time. And I can tell you the pluses and minuses to it. Technology is not quite yet ready for primetime without question. You know, and sometimes small artifacts, some of which I don't even see, cause the autopilot to stop working. What happens in almost every single case is the vehicle just abruptly slows down. So, and it's a scary thing when you're driving 70, 75 miles an hour on the highway and the thing just hits the brakes and it slows down dramatically. Maybe it saw a shadow, you know, you don't know what it saw, but it saw something that triggered a response. And I tell you, it's probably happened to me a dozen times. That being said, it is a remarkable technology to use when we're doing the kinds of things we're doing in our cars.

President Gregory Washington (21:41):
You know, oh boy, I'm giving a whole, it's gonna be funny, you know, but you're in the car and you're driving and he's like, oh man, I gotta blow my nose. Okay. Engage autopilot, things driving on its own. I can reach down into my glove box or into the center console, pull out a tissue, blow my nose, and put it back and it's all cool. I do that, no problem, right. And feel very, very comfortable doing that. Or if I'm coming home long time at work, little tired and need that extra hand: it's not so I fall asleep, I'm still driving, got my hands on the steering wheel, 10 and 2, so I'm still there, but I turn it on just so that I won't drift. That actually works quite well for me. So I do think there are uses, right now, as an assistant--

Missy Cummings (22:27):
I, I agree.

President Gregory Washington (22:28):
to the actual driver, right? We're not at the point where we can totally turn it over to the computer. And this is the thing that's amazing to me. You won't turn the car over, but you put lead <laugh> a hundred million dollar bird out of the sky onto a strip of concrete <laugh>. But you, you feel me here.

Missy Cummings (22:50):
Oh yeah. That's because I know how the sausage is made and I helped make that sausage. And so I see the mistakes that are made and I see the problems in the system.

President Gregory Washington (23:00):
I actually had a number of conversations, not just with engineers from Tesla, but also Zoox, which is an, a company was built to build autonomous vehicles. Say, Hey, well what's the problem? You guys are working on this technology every day. What are you struggling with? Why don't we have it and have it now? What are your thoughts? What do you think?

Missy Cummings (23:19):
So, you know, you hit on one of the issues. I just finished about a year and a quarter with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as the senior safety advisor. And for the last year or so, I've been looking at all the accident reports of any car, including Teslas who had a crash while they were on automation. And so this phantom braking issue that you described, where the car sees something and then decides to dramatically decelerate. So that is not just a Tesla problem, we see it in many other kinds of autonomous vehicles, including ADAS Equip, that's the driving assist systems, and also just the self-driving systems. So we have not yet gotten to the point where computer vision systems, they're just not reliable enough to be able to "see the world in the way that we do."

Missy Cummings (24:09):
And we don't know, is it shadows? You know, we've done some testing with Teslas in my own lab where we have, we can see a statistical correlation with the sun going behind clouds for, even that is enough potentially to trigger a problem with the vision system. So these systems are still really brittle. And I'm not saying we'll never get there, but we're still working out some very, very basic problems. That's just one of many problems. And that, that's the tech problem. But I loved you describing your reaching over to the glove box because I am here to tell you, you guys heard it from me first, that if President Washington ends up at a Tesla accident, it's gonna be because of the accidental steering nudge bump. So one of the things that we've seen in accident mode that we see people do is in these cars, and it's not just Teslas, there's also Blue Cruise and Super Cruise. People are so confident in the systems that what they do is they drop something on the floor, they need to reach around the back of the seat and pick something in the back seat up. Or they need just to get something outta the glove box and they reach across and their shoulder

President Gregory Washington (25:09):
Bumps the steering wheel.

Missy Cummings (25:09):
Just bumps the steering wheel And that, and sometimes, depending on the car is, and depending on the speed that you're going but lemme tell you something else I found, but

President Gregory Washington (25:17):
But the Tesla will go, it'll give you an audible signal, boom boom. And then that'll let you know that it's disengaging autopilot. And you do have some time to adjust sometimes, you know.

Missy Cummings (25:27):
But sometimes you don't. Sometimes you do it at the exact wrong time.

President Gregory Washington (25:30):
No, I get it. I get it. And I, and I get that that could be a problem. Here's the deal. You mentioned something earlier that I thought was really, really interesting. You said that in fighter aircraft, as automation became more and more prevalent and the technology became better and better, you actually started to see accidents decline. I believe you're gonna see a similar thing now. You're seeing accidents go up now, but you gotta correlate that with the fact that there are more and more of these vehicles in the market. I think a comprehensive study may show that the whole host of technologies that are in vehicles now, right? The lane departure warning, the auto-steer that pulls you back, we're probably seeing an overall decrease in the number of minor accidents that would've occurred 'cause you sideswiped somebody or you're coming up to a traffic stop and they would be looking at a text message and run right into the back of the car. I got rear ended that way. Nowadays, vehicles do catch you from doing that. They will stop the vehicle before or at least let you know with blaring signals that an accident is imminent if you don't do something. And so we should start to see, as the vehicle becomes, as the computers become more and more prevalent in how we drive, we should start to see the number of accidents going down, which is gonna have a dramatic effect on insurance companies because they make their money when there are accidents. <laugh>.

Missy Cummings (26:55):
Yeah. Right. Well, I I tell you, they're not too worried right now. Automation, basically, there's two different kinds in cars. There's the safety automated: auto emergency braking, the frontal collision warning. Right? These kinds of safety devices.

President Gregory Washington (27:08):
But those gotta be working.

Missy Cummings (27:08):
They and they are working. And indeed we can see that decrease that you're describing that is happening. But the Teslas, Super Cruise, Blue Cruise, these are convenience features that do lateral and longitudinal control for you. Right. They're doing the acceleration for you and they're doing steering on, right? So the jury is very much out. And there are a lot of scientists, myself, there's some other people at George �鶹��Ƶ looking at this. That jury is out. And I will tell you that having come from NHTSA, I did the analysis myself on all this crash data we have. And I will tell you that if you are in an accident in a car with these convenience features, right, you are statistically more likely to be seriously injured or killed.

President Gregory Washington (27:53):
Really?

Missy Cummings (27:54):
And there's one reason, one really big reason, there's a lot of little reasons...

President Gregory Washington (27:57):
'cause, because you're overdependent?

Missy Cummings (27:59):
That is probably, but there's actually one clear measurable problem.

President Gregory Washington (28:03):
What's that?

Missy Cummings (28:04):
You're speeding. So this is,

President Gregory Washington (28:06):
And that's 'cause of overdependence.

Missy Cummings (28:07):
Well, right. So this is the kind of interaction that we're seeing is that people become so reliant and they love their vehicles and they...President Washington is loving and trusting his vehicle so much that, you know, I'm just gonna go nine miles over the speed limit.

President Gregory Washington (28:20):
Yeah, yeah. No, look, first of all, without incriminating myself too much <laugh>, you hit the nail exactly on the head. <laugh> my speed goes up because I got that technology with me, without question. So now you're making me rethink. Maybe I need to tone the speed down.

Missy Cummings (28:34):
You do need to tone the speed down.

President Gregory Washington (28:36):
And so I will, I will definitely do that. But that brings me to another question because there's a YouTube video out there, and I know you've seen it, with the title, "Missy Cummings wants to destroy Tesla." <Laugh> True statement, overstatement, or what?

Missy Cummings (28:50):
No, of course it's an overstatement. I want Tesla to survive. I mean, my favorite thing about Tesla is the fact that it doesn't have a dealer model. Like if you wanna be, you go with any woman to try to buy a car and you will realize how much women hate the dealer models. Right? So we would love...

President Gregory Washington (29:07):
It ain't just women. Hello. Hope they look like me. You, you, you know what's I'm saying? Hey, look, I, I, I've been there. And um, you're absolutely right. It was so easy. You can pull up your computer right now and within 15 minutes I can buy a Tesla.

Missy Cummings (29:22):
For a lot cheaper these days.

President Gregory Washington (29:23):
Yeah, that's exactly right. Because of the "Missy Cummings wants to destroy Tesla" video. But <laugh>.

Missy Cummings (29:29):
I wish I, I wish I had that kind of power, but I will, I will tell you, look, I love the car itself is great. The model behind the car in terms of the deal, no dealer model.

President Gregory Washington (29:39):
Oh, that's fantastic.

Missy Cummings (29:40):
The picture of like, I, there are so many good things to love about Tesla, but I think that Tesla, they were first out to try to do something brave and innovative. And I get that. But now one of the other things I call it, you know, your mom always said, if you see your friends jump off a cliff, are you gonna go jump up a cliff? So now Tesla had some questionable design decisions about letting people be hands free, but now all the other car companies are modeling after Tesla.

President Gregory Washington (30:06):
Right. I hear you.

Missy Cummings (30:06):
And I do not think we should allow that. I think no car, not Tesla, not Ford, not GM, no car should in any driver assist, should allow you to be hands-free. And that is a very unpopular opinion. But unfortunately the Teslarati wants to try to blow that up into something like Missy Cummings is coming for your autopilot.

President Gregory Washington (30:24):
Yeah, no, I get it. Now look, if there could be wholesale adoption on the manner in which you buy and sell Teslas, that I tell you would be a game changer. The reality is it was so easy for me to buy my car. It literally took me about 15 minutes.

Missy Cummings (30:43):
Yeah. I'll do free advertising for them for that. Like I love that feature of their car. But I think the whole Teslarati thinking that I'm out to get them, it kind of points to the bigger problem. There's two problems it points to: number one, women in tech, women who assert themselves in tech. You know, it's funny, we, we talked about the fighter pilot thing was I discriminated against as a fighter pilot? Yeah. But I'll tell you what's shocking to me is the fact that I was a fighter pilot, carry a PhD, have been a tenured MIT professor, have done all of these things that the Teslarati and other tech bros hate the fact that I'm asserting myself and that I'm a broad. I'm a pushy broad, trying to push my opinion that is not favorable to their stock price. Right. So that's one issue.

President Gregory Washington (31:27):
That's what you think it is.

Missy Cummings (31:28):
Yeah, but I think also it points to the devisive nature of this country. Like I have a very, I think, balanced view of Tesla. It's a great car except for this bad autopilot that when you have your hands free or it basically promotes you into complacency. So I can like the car, but not like a feature. But that ability to have a balanced view towards really any person, politically, to a technology. Like you're either with me or against me. You know, kind of That's how people,

President Gregory Washington (31:59):
It's all, you're either in it, you're all in, or you're, or you're all out. That's right. I get it. I get it. A hundred percent. This is interesting. In the last few minutes I have, I wanna steer us more closer to your research and what you're doing or what you will be doing here at �鶹��Ƶ. The real advance in all of this is intelligence, right? We are bringing more and more intelligence to the systems, right? Whether it is classic neural networks with back propagation or Kohonen networks and the like, or deep learning, or it's just the idea of bringing expert modeling and systems into code, right? Where you take into account hundreds and thousands of variables in terms of decision making. The reality is, is that systems are getting more intelligent and you stand at the forefront of this. And so talk to us a little bit about the degree program you're putting in place and how do you see that fitting in to everything that you've learned up to this point?

Missy Cummings (32:58):
Yeah, these are great questions. You say that intelligence is advancing. And I will tell you, an approximation of intelligence is advancing. Understood. So artificial intelligence is artificial and not intelligent. And if you've heard about GPT, the large language models.

President Gregory Washington (33:13):
Yeah, yeah. ChatGPT.

Missy Cummings (33:14):
These are things are dangerous because they're good enough to approximate language. But if you actually pay attention, you can see very quickly how wrong and dangerous disinformation coming from something like chat GPT could be. But I've spent a lot of time, obviously in the aviation world now in the surface transportation world. I've spent some time in the medical world and looking at these large language models. And the one common theme across all of these are intelligence technologies are advancing so rapidly. What we're not doing is keeping up with allowing people to get educated in how to think about the design frameworks behind when should you have these systems? Why should you have these systems? What requirements are they really meeting? And then how should I test these systems to make sure that they're sufficient?

Missy Cummings (34:01):
And this whole idea of the design life cycle around AI, it's new thinking. Like people think, oh yeah, we know how to design systems. We've got agile system development. Well it turns out for safety critical technologies, maybe your testing framework needs to be a little different. Maybe you need to do different kinds of component testing. And guess what? Digital twinning, like I'm so sick of hearing digital twins because you can digital twin AI all you want, but garbage in, garbage out. The only way, if you're ever gonna know if your Tesla is actually going to not hit children, and this is a big debate going on right now in the Tesla community, is you do have to put it on the road and you do have to put it in various tests, real tests, not fake tests. Not FSD full self-driving tests. Like really principle tests that are answering and research question. And, and I think companies are reluctant to do this because it's expensive. It takes time and effort that maybe they wanna spend other money on. But

President Gregory Washington (34:57):
But the other thing is that they could fail. And when you fail the,

Missy Cummings (35:02):
It's more development cost.

President Gregory Washington (35:03):
Well, not just that the results are catastrophic. Right? I remember looking at the Tesla stock price when the first Tesla fire hit the news and you just watched the share price drop. That's somebody's livelihood. And reality is these are complex systems. Complex systems will fail, right? You have 'em in automobiles, you have 'em in rockets, you 'em in airplanes. You have 'em in fighter aircraft, right? There's been failures. Failure is a part of the process. You hope that you can put it in the context where there's not loss of of life. The reality is that these things do happen.

Missy Cummings (35:40):
Yes. And, and I agree with Henry Petrosky, he's a famous Duke professor who says to, to fail is just a core component of engineering. I'm all about that, right? But I think with artificial intelligence, one of the problems that we're seeing is that there just really aren't testing paradigms to try to at least figure out how to mitigate risk.

President Gregory Washington (35:59):
No, no, I get it. I think it's a little more, and I don't want to use the word nefarious 'cause I don't think people are trying to do harm. I think the challenge is a little different in that nowadays we don't know when we're interacting with AI technology and when we're not. Right? It's not ubiquitous yet, but it is far more intrusive in our everyday lives than we actually realize. And so you can be interacting with your vehicle, not a Tesla, but we own a BMW as another vehicle. Right? You could be interacting with that vehicle and there could be aspects of artificial intelligence handling some systems and you actually have no idea, right? People are dealing with ChatGPT and there, they're being told that they're dealing with artificial intelligence, but they're dealing with a whole host of technologies on their computers as they go to websites and as they frequent the internet on a day-to-day basis where they're not told and they're interacting with something, thinking that they might be interacting with a human and they're actually interacting with a bot, right? You would handle things differently if you knew it was a bot relative to a human. And so we need guardrails.

Missy Cummings (37:07):
And that's exactly what we're gonna teach you at �鶹��Ƶ.

President Gregory Washington (37:10):
Outstanding.

Missy Cummings (37:11):
We're gonna teach you how to build them, how to set systems up to design them, how to interpret them, how to recognize when you need guardrails. So this is one of the things I think that �鶹��Ƶ is just has such a rich field to pull from. There's many, many government agencies here. There's lots of top talent faculty here. Lots of really motivated students who are gonna work in all aspects of industry. We've got healthcare, we've got DOD, DHS, transportation industry. So I'm really looking to build a strong cohort of people who can recognize, do I need guardrails? What kind of guardrails? And how do I maintain those guardrails over time?

President Gregory Washington (37:52):
�鶹��Ƶ is constructing the Fuse building on its �鶹��Ƶ Square campus in Arlington. As you know, the building will house research labs, corporate innovation centers, incubators and accelerators. How does that interdisciplinary model fit into your research?

Missy Cummings (38:08):
Well, I'm hoping personally to teach classes in that building and actually have an offshoot of my lab out there. Because with all this work that we're doing with government agencies on safe, secure, trustworthy AI, we anticipate offering research and lab-based classes out there. So it's critical to my research and critical to the overall interdisciplinary nature of AI in general.

President Gregory Washington (38:33):
Well look, I am looking forward to what you're gonna do in Fuse. I think it's going to be fantastic. Just talk a little bit about how academia can be the agent that educates industry and government employees to actually ask the right questions about AI's performance, its weaknesses, its strengths, and its shortcomings.

Missy Cummings (38:54):
Yeah. So these are great questions. I think first and foremost we have to recognize...to start looking at the assumptions in the design and construction of AI. So I think what a lot of people miss is they think that AI is this great computational tool, one plus one is two. And so how can you argue with the math that's coming out of AI, for example? Well, it turns out that there's a lot of subjective work. And I personally have done research and I'm continuing to do this research that looks at the assumptions that modelers make. So when you're engineering, your computer scientist develops an algorithm, for example. They actually make a lot of guesses about how to initialize certain parameters inside the algorithm. How do I set some hyper parameters? And they don't really understand that the way that they set up the problem can actually cause the model to have very different outcomes as opposed to maybe another engineer who sets up a problem.

Missy Cummings (39:50):
So one of the research projects that I'm working on now that's gonna continue probably out at the Arlington campus is looking at data labeling. So it turns out, after spending some time with Amazon, I learned just how much data labeling is happening in offshore places like India and around the world. And lots of companies are using them. And then the question is, if you have people labeling images for eight hours a day, is that labeling just as good in their eighth hour as it is in the first hour? And one of the things that we're looking at my research right now is how does sloppy labeling not wrong labeling? So it's not wrong, people weren't circling the wrong image, the component of the image, but they were very sloppy. And then when you run that through a convolutional neural net, how much of the sloppiness and the data labeling shows up in the quality of the outcomes? Turns out it's pretty significant. And so.

President Gregory Washington (40:46):
That's part of the data set that's gonna be part of the model.

Missy Cummings (40:49):
That's right. So I really want to help people focus on knowing when, where, why, and how to ask those questions about the underpinnings of AI. Is there an assumption that was made in the development of this AI that could have a downstream effect? And not that you then shouldn't use the AI with that downstream problem, but at least you know that then there is potentially on the, on the downstream side that you have to maybe not trust the outcomes as much as you would if you had better quality data going into it.

President Gregory Washington (41:21):
Outstanding. I'm so looking forward to what we're gonna be able to give to the community, especially as this field continues to grow and as it continues to have an impact on taxpayers supported dollars. Right. The investment that the country is making in these technologies, you need to have an understanding of when to use 'em, when not to use them, and when to be cautious about their use.

Missy Cummings (41:46):
Right, and when people make big claims, I would like to give people tool sets to be able to evaluate those claims for themselves.

President Gregory Washington (41:54):
Outstanding. So I get to ask you a controversial question.

Missy Cummings (41:58):
Oh, what? We haven't been <laugh>.

President Gregory Washington (41:59):
Really, a really controversial one.

Missy Cummings (42:01):
Okay.

President Gregory Washington (42:02):
How long, in your opinion, before we actually see full self-driving vehicles? Well,

Missy Cummings (42:06):
I'm just gonna need a definition from you first. Do you mean like

President Gregory Washington (42:10):
<laughs> I mean you get in the vehicle and there's a steering wheel you can take over. So the whole concept from Zoox where you, there's no steering wheel, you just get in and ride: I'm not talking about that. But vehicles that are full self-driving where you have the option to say you push a button and the car just takes over.

Missy Cummings (42:28):
And you get in the backseat and go to sleep if you want and it'll take you to Vegas.

President Gregory Washington (42:31):
Well I'm not talking about that <laugh>. But you actually have the ability to do that: The technology will be sophisticated enough that you could indeed go in the backseat and go to sleep. When do you think that'll happen? Now not, I'm not saying that we will ever get to a point where the community allows that to happen, but when the technology is mature enough to happen?

Missy Cummings (42:51):
We're not even close.

President Gregory Washington (42:52):
We're not even close even. So how many...

Missy Cummings (42:54):
You know, I'm gonna pull a typical academic response. Oh, 10 to 15 years. 'cause that's the secret academic speak for, we don't know <laugh>, we, we have no idea. Right.

President Gregory Washington (43:03):
It's far enough away that where you can't get called on it.

Missy Cummings (43:06):
But yeah. Right. So I think that that we will see in the short term, there's been a lot of success. I mean you see it on George �鶹��Ƶ's campus with Starship little grocery delivery. So companies like Neuro who have the bigger vehicles are on the road that the purpose-built. Yeah. I think that they--

President Gregory Washington (43:22):
Those are working!

Missy Cummings (43:23):
Those are working. And we, I think that there's a real legitimate profit building.

President Gregory Washington (43:28):
What is it? TU has the trucks out there.

Missy Cummings (43:31):
So I think that small last mile delivery is probably where we'll see that first happen. You know, it just like Waymo is struggling still. Cruise is under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. I mean, all signs are like they're making incremental progress. But if you're asking me, should I go ahead and start investing in self-driving cars because they're gonna start turning a profit next year, I don't know when that year is gonna be.

President Gregory Washington (43:58):
Here's the last controversial question. What do you say to people who worry that automation will be taking away even more jobs from people? 'Cause we know they have taken away some jobs, we know where this is going. Talk about that a little bit.

Missy Cummings (44:13):
Yeah, I don't think we know where it's going. I think we think we know where it's going because we hear, you know, the media's job is to kind of get you to click more. So the headlines are always bad on this front, but I've been predicting this correctly for a long time. Look, it's true. Elevator men and you know, there were always a man in the elevator, maybe occasionally a woman who pushed the buttons for the elevator. Are those people out of a job because of automation? Yes. Yes. But they probably needed to be out of a job. That job didn't, that was dull and tedious and it didn't need to be there. Now are we at a place where we might lose a few jobs here or there to automation? I would say yes. Particularly in factories and manufacturing. Again, these are jobs that destroy the dignity of humans.

Missy Cummings (44:57):
I would love to get the people who are having to pack my Amazon boxes. This is really, really boring work for them. It causes repetitive distress injury. I would love to get that job automated as quickly as possible. It turns out it's very hard to automate. The human hand is a thing of genius. Eventually we will start to see more and more jobs automated as we figure it out. But every time we automate one job, it opens the door to 10 more. And I think that that's what people don't realize is that we can't have enough manufacturing workers right now. We are in such a glut of labor workforce; pilots, like, you wanna be a pilot? Go sign up because we don't have enough pilots right now! So I think that people tend to hear the worst when they hear about robots are coming. I will tell you, taxi drivers, you do not have anything to worry about. Truck drivers. You do not have anything to worry about. Like

President Gregory Washington (45:51):
So you got a long time before the vehicles start driving themselves and take your jobs.

Missy Cummings (45:56):
Oh, we are so far away from that. And what's happening is we are seeing the creation of so many more jobs. And I'll tell you something else that the audience, if you're looking for a good stock tip, start your own robot maintenance company because we can't keep them all working. For the manufacturing robots that are out there, a lot of them have to sit into a closet because they don't have enough people to come and fix them when they inevitably break down.

President Gregory Washington (46:21):
Outstanding. Well this has been fantastic and I cannot wait to see the results of your research. And that will do it for this episode of Access to Excellence. I'd like to thank my guests, Professor Missy Cummings, who directs �鶹��Ƶ's Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Translational AI for taking the time to speak with me. I am �鶹��Ƶ President Gregory Washington saying, until next time, be safe �鶹��Ƶ Nation.

Missy Cummings (46:54):
And don't speed in your autopilot.

President Gregory Washington (46:56):
Alright. Of course.

Outro (46:58):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students graduates in higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.

In This Story

Gregory Washington

Missy Cummings

Access to Excellence Podcast Episodes

Podcast: A small cup with big impact in the fight against Lyme disease
July 14, 2025
Podcast: A Future We Want: One Grand Challenge. Six Grand Solutions
June 3, 2025
Podcast: Building community and conversation through the arts
April 21, 2025
Podcast: Peace building amid the rise of global conflict
March 17, 2025
Podcast: James Baldwin’s insights on American life and identity
February 17, 2025

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Podcast Episode

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�鶹��Ƶ

Artificial Intelligence

College of Engineering and Computing

Volgenau School of Engineering

School of Computing

robotics and autonomous systems

Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Translational AI

�鶹��Ƶ Autonomy and Robotics Center

Schar School Student Duo Win ‘Most Interesting Presentation’ in Student Research Competition

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:51:59 +0000

Schar School Student Duo Win ‘Most Interesting Presentation’ in Student Research Competition Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/19/2021 - 04:51

In This Story

Delton T. Daigle

Sally Kishi

Originally published on May 20, 2020

Seven Schar School teams, along with numerous others from colleges at �鶹��Ƶ, signed up to “virtually” display their research posters in an annual campus-wide competition. The “Virtual Celebration of Student Scholarship” is sponsored by the Honors College.

While judges considered many elements in the three-minute presentations of the posters—among other attributes, the judges looked at the information, organization, creativity, and potential impact on its field—only one team could be awarded “Most Interesting Presentation.” This year that award went to Government and International Politics majors Sasha Silva and Sally Kishi for their research poster titled “Chile: Populism, Nativism, and Economic Uncertainty.”

“I think we won because our research provided a new and unique perspective on a topic that has been previously researched by other �鶹��Ƶ students and faculty,” said Kishi, a junior from Fairfax, Va. “We supported our statistical findings with an explanation based on real-life events that I believe made our presentation more understandable, accessible, and intriguing to a broader audience.”

Sasha Silva

Overseen by faculty advisor Associate Professor Delton Daigle, their research poster presented a quantitative analysis on the 2017 general election in Chile. They verified that the right-wing vote was related to high levels of nativism and economic uncertainty.

“We stripped our research down to its basics to make it digestible and engaging for the audience, and Dr. Daigle really pushed us to make it our best work possible,” said Silva, a junior from Annandale, Va.

Not to mention rehearsing the presentation “for about four hours,” she added. “It still did not come out perfect but I’m proud of it given our time constraints.”

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�鶹��Ƶ

Schar School Professor Justin Gest Wins Teaching Excellence Award

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:46:43 +0000

Schar School Professor Justin Gest Wins Teaching Excellence Award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/19/2021 - 04:46

In This Story

Justin Gest

2020 �鶹��Ƶ Excellence in Teaching Award Winner Justin Gest

Originally published on May 19, 2020

Schar School of Policy and Government Associate Professor Justin Gest has received �鶹��Ƶ’s highest teaching honor, the 2020 Teaching Excellence Award. Recipients of the annual award are recognized for their significant work in course planning, innovation, and curriculum development.

“I was particularly impressed by the variety of problem-based learning opportunities, hands-on experience through field trips, connecting with clients, and inviting important speakers to your courses that your students receive,” a representative of the award’s selection committee wrote in the judges’ comments.

Gest is a professor of public policy researching comparative politics, immigration policy, minority politics, and qualitative methods. He has published commentary in a number of major news outlets including the Washington Post, Politico, and Reuters. His well-received books include The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (2016) and Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Demographic Change (2018).

Before joining the Schar School, Gest was a Harvard College Fellow and lecturer in Harvard University’s Departments of Government and Sociology. In 2014, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, Harvard’s highest award for teaching.

“With a broad-minded education and equipped with strong communication skills, students can develop their ideas, share them, and own them,” said Gest. “That is what I hope that they take away from my courses—not my ideas, but their own.

“And in this way, the student becomes my achievement,” he said. “The student becomes my legacy. The student becomes me, and I become the student.”

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Schar School of Policy and Government

�鶹��Ƶ

Studies: Nicotine Exposure Increases Vulnerability to COVID-19 Not Only in Heart and Lungs, but Also the Brain

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:37:44 +0000

Studies: Nicotine Exposure Increases Vulnerability to COVID-19 Not Only in Heart and Lungs, but Also the Brain Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/19/2021 - 04:37

In This Story

Jim Olds

James Olds: ‘This is a new and evolving situation, and we need to be highly vigilant on many fronts.’

Originally published on May 14, 2020

Five days after President Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, Schar School neurobiologist James Olds and Nadine Kabbani, an associate professor at �鶹��Ƶ’s School of Systems Biology, released a study linking prior nicotine exposure to COVID-19 cardiopulmonary vulnerability. The study called on data and research from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002 and concluded that those exposed to nicotine are “primed” to be at higher risk of COVID-19.

They published a second study days later revealing similar findings regarding the COVID-19 and the brain.

“Smoking history is germane to how the disease will present in patients,” said Olds, former Director of Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Understanding the symptoms is important for early detection and management. Asymptomatic individuals may also be at some risk that we still don't understand.”

Kabbani, an associate professor in �鶹��Ƶ’s School of Systems Biology and associate director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, said the nicotine exposure can come from smoking cigarettes, using electronic cigarettes, vaping, or maybe even second-hand smoke.

“Prolonged nicotine exposure systemically—through various kinds of smoking habits—may thus provide a cellular mechanism for susceptibility to the virus and impact illness severity,” she said. “The activation of nicotinic receptors by smoking is coupled to how the host receptor for the virus, ACE2, is distributed on lung epithelial cells.”

The cardiopulmonary study was published in The FEBS Journal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. The second study, published April 1 in the journal Molecular Pharmacology, drew the same conclusions about nicotine exposure and heightened vulnerability in the brain. The bottom line: “Viral entry into the brain now appears a strong possibility with deleterious consequences and an urgent need for addressing.”

The World Health Organization released a statement addressing nicotine vulnerability on May 11.

“If our hypothesis is correct, nicotine consumption in Latin America and Africa predict future health challenges for at-risk populations as the epidemic proceeds,” warned Olds. “This is a new and evolving situation, and we need to be highly vigilant on many fronts.”

Additional reporting by Colleen Kearney Rich.

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Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

TTIP

Tech Talent Investment Program

Four Schar School Graduates Win Award from Global Training Firm Content Enablers

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:29:28 +0000

Four Schar School Graduates Win Award from Global Training Firm Content Enablers Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/19/2021 - 04:29

In This Story

Kenneth A. Reinert

Originally published on May14, 2020

Four graduates of the Schar School’s Master’s in International Commerce and Policy (ICP) program have been awarded the Content Enablers Trade Compliance Award.

Content Enablers, a Schar School online education partner, is a global trade compliance training firm assisting some of the world’s largest and most vital companies in accessing markets. The student award provides access to Content Enablers’ trade compliance training, valued at $1,500, free of charge to the awardees.

This year’s awardees are Brian Bowling, Jason Zimmermann, Ryan Krysiak, and Tyler Stone.

The awards are symbols of Content Enablers’ commitment to the program as well as the accomplishments of the awardees, said International Commerce and Policy program director Ken Reinert.

“I am very happy that our partnership with Content Enablers has allowed us to recognize the hard work of these four awardees,” Reinert said. “I wish them the very best in their future endeavors.”

—Buzz McClain

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Schar School of Policy and Government

�鶹��Ƶ

Schar School’s Jack Goldstone Wins Prestigious Carnegie Fellowship

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:26:57 +0000

Schar School’s Jack Goldstone Wins Prestigious Carnegie Fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/19/2021 - 04:26

In This Story

Mark J. Rozell

Jack A. Goldstone

Louise I. Shelley

Originally published on May 12, 2020

The Carnegie Corporation of New York announced today that Schar School of Policy and Government public policy professor Jack Goldstone is one of 27 recipients of this year’s Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program awards.

“Really quite a surprise,” Goldstone said upon learning of the award.

Goldstone, who has been with the Schar School at �鶹��Ƶ since 2003, is the director of the Schar School’s Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy and is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Chair Professor of Public Policy.

The award provides a $200,000 stipend—the largest of its kind, the corporation says—toward funding research in the social sciences and humanities. Goldstone has spent his career researching the intersection of population trends and, he said, is about to take an even deeper dive.

Goldstone begins his fellowship in September. His research, he said, will look at how different population trends will affect international economy and security. It will be an extension of the research he has been doing through a multi-year, $1.1 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation he received in March.

But whereas the Koch grant mainly provides summer salaries and support for Goldstone’s Schar School PhD student-researchers, the Carnegie fellowship will allow him to take a year to write what he hopes will be a significant book addressing these issues.

“Right now, population change is really confronting the world with lots of challenges,” said Goldstone, who was nominated for the fellowship by the university. “How are we going to support and care for aging generations when we’re facing a huge economic downturn? How will the young, fast-growing labor force in Africa and South Asia be productively employed?”

“And if the shift in world population in religion is leading to a world where Muslims will be more numerous than Christians for the first time in history, we need to work out a cooperative relationship between them,” he said. “If we don’t do that and deteriorate into confrontation and conflict, then we go back to the Middle Ages, where Islam and Christianity are at war all over the world.”

Goldstone said he has been able to pursue these questions because of the Schar School’s rich interdisciplinary environment, not to mention its “wonderful graduate students.”

“Jack Goldstone is that rare social scientist whose scholarly insights have shaped the thinking of both academic researchers and policy professionals on such critical topics as revolutions and political demography,” said Schar School Dean Mark J. Rozell. “His work embodies the Schar School’s commitment to leading both scholarship and public policy impact.”

“It’s another affirmation,” Goldstone said of his fellowship, “that the work my colleagues and I are doing at �鶹��Ƶ on global population trends addresses major social challenges. I am deeply honored to get this support from the Carnegie Foundation.”

He is the third �鶹��Ƶ professor and the second from the Schar School to receive the award, following the Schar School’s Louise Shelley (2015), director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, and Charlotte Gill (2017), deputy director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy .

�鶹��Ƶ is one of just 15 universities nationwide with three or more Carnegie Fellows, including Yale, Duke, Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

Additional reporting by Buzz McClain.

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Schar School Scholars Inducted into Top Honor Societies in a Virtual Ceremony

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 08:19:10 +0000

Schar School Scholars Inducted into Top Honor Societies in a Virtual Ceremony Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/19/2021 - 03:19

Originally published on April 28, 2020

Since early in the academic year, ceremonies have been on the schedule to induct students into prestigious honor societies that recognize high achieving Schar School students. When university leaders announced in March that all of �鶹��Ƶ’s on-campus activities would be cancelled for the rest of the year, the Schar School’s Student Services team began looking for another way to celebrate student excellence.

Each honor society sets rigorous standards for student achievement. The Pi Sigma Alpha (PSA) National Political Science Honor Society was founded in 1920 and has had a chapter at �鶹��Ƶ since 1983. This spring, 38 students in the top third of their government classes joined the PSA Xi Lambda chapter.

The global honor society for public affairs and administration, Pi Alpha Alpha (PAA), requires a 3.8 GPA and completion of at least half of all coursework for invitation to the organization. PAA welcomed 23 new graduate students from �鶹��Ƶ for the 2019-2020 school year.

Associate Professor James Burroughs is the former director of the Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) program and helped found PAA at �鶹��Ƶ. “What impresses me is that most of our PAA members are balancing jobs, families, and school,” said Burroughs. “They have performed consistently well in a variety of subjects and with professors who all have different standards and expectations. Still, in each class they have risen to the top.”

Faculty share similar admiration for students in the Xi Lambda chapter of the political science honor society. Robert J. McGrath, director of the Schar School’s two bachelor’s programs—Public Administration and Government and International Affairs—noted, “PSA students stand out in the classroom for their willingness to lead: to lead discussions, to help their peers with problem sets, and to take their book knowledge and apply it in internships.”

For all �鶹��Ƶ students, and especially for those graduating this spring, the coronavirus has brought a jarring end to on-campus life. �鶹��Ƶ’s response to the global health challenges, along with the governor’s stay-at-home order, is critical to flatten the curve and keep students and families safe. However, it also involves losses for deserving students.

Cancelled inductions notwithstanding, honor society students will still be able to enjoy the benefits of membership. Inductees join large international networks of honor society members. They will have opportunities in the future to take part in conferences and events hosted by their respective organizations.

Samantha Brien, Master’s in Public Administration student in her final semester, appreciated the opportunity to join a prestigious group. “Starting the MPA program, I felt a sense of stability—this is what I was meant to do,” Brien said. “Being inducted into PAA really reinforced that I could excel in this type of career. To be inducted into PAA means I have accomplished more than I thought I could within this program.”

Faculty and staff remained committed to a public recognition of these deserving students’ achievements. The Schar School as a whole has found innovative ways to provide continuity of learning in using Blackboard Collaborate and other videoconferencing tools. In March, the Schar School Student Services team pivoted quickly to new formats to ensure robust student support. Advisors have been using Webex meetings for PhD defenses and for virtual advising appointments. Webex Teams complements email and phone for efficient communication among staff. Paul Nooney, Associate Director of Student Services, has taken the lead in mastering various online platforms, and shares his knowledge with colleagues.

Nooney became familiar with Webex Events, a platform designed for presentations. For the first time ever, the PSA and PAA advisors joined forces, and a joint virtual honor society ceremony was scheduled for mid-April. During the planning process, Nooney and this author (I am a PSA advisor and Director of PhD Student Services) learned that a master’s student had joined the chapter of one of �鶹��Ƶ’s smaller honor societies, Nu Lamda Mu—the international honor society for nonprofit management. Including this student in the ceremony was a natural fit, made easier by the flexibility of the virtual platform and the team.

Thirty participants attended the April 17th virtual ceremony to induct members into all three honor societies. Schar School Dean Mark J. Rozell spoke, as did five Schar School faculty members. The Executive Director of Pi Sigma Alpha, Sean Twombley, was also on hand to welcome the members.

“I thought the virtual ceremony was an innovative way to acknowledge our academic accomplishments in our degree programs,” said Brien. “During a time of uncertainty, where it felt like we may not get any acknowledgement, George �鶹��Ƶ made it possible. I am graduating in May and it felt like a nice way to cap off my program. Since we may not get a graduation or it may be late, it was nice to have something to look forward to.”

Ann Ludwick, Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, helped induct new members to PSA during the event. “Over the years, �鶹��Ƶ’s Pi Sigma Alpha chapter has hosted speakers, career talks, and other events,” she said. “One thing has remained consistent: Members have been class leaders and engaged scholars. I appreciate the contributions of this year’s inductees and am so pleased we were able to recognize their outstanding accomplishments in such a unique way.”

The April 17th ceremony struck a balance between celebration and solemnity. In today’s world, these emerging leaders in government and public administration are called to serve the common good, which can be a tall order.

“There is no more important time to be studying and preparing for a career in public affairs,” said Bonnie Stabile, director of the Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) program. “The pandemic has made clear that well-thought-out responses at every level of government are required to save lives and reduce suffering, and that designing and implementing such solutions is exceedingly complex. Our students of public policy and public administration are honing their skills to meet such challenges.”

It is fitting that the Schar School’s Student Services team is adapting in response to a changing higher education landscape. This is exactly what students studying policy and government are learning to do as they look towards public service in a rapidly changing world.

“We are proud of their dedication to public service and their academic accomplishments,“ said McGrath. “We wish that we could have celebrated them in person, but it was an honor for me to read their names in recognition of how they have enriched us all at the Schar School

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Horizon Hall will be open for classes on Jan. 25

Damian Cristodero — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 20:41:17 +0000

Horizon Hall will be open for classes on Jan. 25 Damian Cristodero Thu, 12/17/2020 - 15:41

Ann Ardis, the dean of �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is looking forward to getting into the college’s new offices in Horizon Hall. It will be nice, she said, to have many of the college’s departments and interdisciplinary programs in one location rather than spread out over the Fairfax Campus.

But Ardis is also excited about what Horizon Hall will mean for teaching and learning when the building opens four classrooms on Jan. 25, the start of the spring semester.

The active learning classrooms in the first two floors of the building are a “huge” new asset for the university community, Ardis said.

The six-floor, 218,000-square-foot building is the centerpiece of the Core Campus Project that is transforming the center of the Fairfax Campus with a new and expanded Wilkins Plaza (including the memorial to the enslaved people of George �鶹��Ƶ), a renovated Harris Theatre, new green space, and an upgrade to the university’s utility infrastructure.

Though there is still plenty of work to be done—the old Robinson Hall B must be torn down to make room for the terraced amphitheater and meditation garden—the opening of Horizon Hall represents a significant milestone, especially considering the challenges from COVID-19.

“As a result of COVID, we’ve had supply chain challenges. We’ve had labor challenges,” said Cathy Pinskey, capital program director in �鶹��Ƶ’s Facilities department. “But we really stayed focused on trying to make up the time where we could, and because we opened up lines of communication with people really early, it helped to get to the goal to be open at the end of January.”

When students show up for classes, the only thing remaining to be completed should be some furniture installation to the upper floors.

Classrooms are spacious and can accommodate from 24 to 120 students, though COVID restrictions will limit class sizes to 30% or 40% of capacities, Pinskey said.

All classes are equipped for video collaboration and instruction. The �鶹��Ƶ Innovation Exchange (MIX) will also be located in Horizon Hall.

“Horizon Hall’s opening is significant because it successfully showcases our commitment to building classrooms and learning spaces that truly support active, engaged student learning in face-to-face and hybrid modalities,” said Kim Eby, �鶹��Ƶ’s associate provost for faculty affairs and development. “This commitment was articulated in our most recent strategic plan and it’s incredible to see this come to fruition.”

“The entire building is designed to enable student engagement and opportunities for student learning and collaboration,” Ardis said. “There will be places for students to work by themselves or in small groups and study spaces where students can engage with faculty.”

She called the building a “game changer.”

“Bringing students to that building, and recruiting students to �鶹��Ƶ by walking them through Horizon Hall and through Wilkins Plaza, that’s going to be such a positive,” Ardis said.

On a recent December day, workers were moving furniture and putting the final touches on staircases and rooms. There was the occasional rattle of a circular saw. Pinskey called it controlled chaos.

“I’ll be excited to see people in it, to see people using it. That’s the most rewarding part,” she said of Horizon Hall. “It’s nice to see it coming together. Yeah, it’s exciting.

Inside Horizon Hall, which will be the new home of �鶹��Ƶ's College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services.

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College of Humanities and Social Sciences

The �鶹��Ƶ clock is back on Wilkins Plaza

Damian Cristodero — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 19:34:13 +0000

The �鶹��Ƶ clock is back on Wilkins Plaza Damian Cristodero Wed, 12/16/2020 - 14:34

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

The iconic �鶹��Ƶ clock, a gift to the university from the Class of 1999, was reinstalled on Tuesday at what will be the center of the expanded Wilkins Plaza next to Horizon Hall, after a top to bottom refurbishment by the clock’s manufacturer, Verdin.

The entire exterior of the clock was cleaned. It also has new scratch-resistant lenses. Best of all, though, the clock’s electronics were updated, meaning you will be able to trust the time displayed.

“They were replaced with modern digital controls that will automatically keep the clock on time without it having to be manually programmed,” said Steve Vollmer, assistant director of operations for Facilities Management.

Vollmer said he was unsure when the manufacturer would make the clock operational.

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For these graduates it's a December to remember

Damian Cristodero — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 15:44:24 +0000

For these graduates it's a December to remember Damian Cristodero Wed, 12/16/2020 - 10:44

Mohammed Saffouri

Film and Video Studies

Life hasn’t slowed down for graduating film and video studies major Mohammed Saffouri since he completed his award-winning documentary “The First.”

“The First,” which Saffouri created for the FAVS 365 Documentary Filmmaking class, follows 24-year-old Libyan American Abrar Omeish as she campaigns for and wins a seat on the Fairfax County School Board in 2019, becoming one of Virginia’s youngest elected officials and the first Muslim woman on the board.

The documentary garnered Saffouri a prestigious Capital Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter. The accolades didn’t stop there. The documentary was featured in a number of film festivals, winning the Student Documentary Grand Prize at the March on Washington Film Festival and the Best Short Documentary at Georgia’s Broad Street Film Fest.

Saffouri has spent the past year and half preparing for and making his senior film, which is currently in post-production. The narrative film is based on his grandfather’s experiences as a young soccer player who makes the national team just as his family is forced to emigrate from his native Palestine.

The film, titled “Touchline,” was shot in Jordan last summer. Saffouri worked with a producer there and said the shoot was a challenging process not only with the pandemic but because it is a period film set in 1948.

“We had to rent antique cars,” he said. “We shot in the cities of Amman and Al-Salt. We used Al-Salt because it looks like Haifa would have in 1948.”

The pre-production work for “Touchline” was completed at �鶹��Ƶ with the help of the Film and Video Studies faculty, he said. Although the pandemic delayed the project, Saffouri said the attention his documentary received definitely made making his senior film easier, especially in terms of raising money for the production.

As the end of his college career approaches, Saffouri is working with film professionals in Qatar, Los Angeles, and Egypt to complete “Touchline,” which he plans to enter into a number of international film festivals.

“[“The First”] was a requirement for a class,” Saffouri said. “I was using it to see how the [film festival] process worked and was surprised by the amount of recognition it received. It definitely was a good way to market myself and helped tell people who I am.”

“Mohammed is one of those rare students whose drive and dogged passion for creating films by any means necessary eclipses most,” said filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu, an assistant professor in the Film and Video Studies Program. “His desire to create authentic films related to his specific cultural/ethnic existence is necessary within an often-homogeneous canon of cinema. We are all perpetually inspired by his contagious tenacity.”

— Colleen Kearney Rich

Trinidad Lara

Anthropology

Trinidad Lara was born in Santiago, Chile, and also lived in Japan and Russia with her family before settling in Newport News, Virginia.

While at �鶹��Ƶ she also studied abroad for a year and a half in France. All of those experiences contributed to her major in anthropology.

“For me, I was always an outsider and always looking at society from my particular standpoint,” she said. “The experience of growing up and being a bit different and being interested in what was going on in different cultural context, definitely pushed me to wanting to pursue an area of study that helped me to further explore these questions.”

A member of �鶹��Ƶ’s Honors College, Lara came to the university on the recommendation of a high school advisor and because of its proximity to Washington, D.C. She said she found �鶹��Ƶ’s campuses—the most diverse among Virginia’s public research universities—a rewarding amalgam of ideas.

“Looking back on the experience, I gained so much,” Lara said. “I had great professors. I met some great people, and my experience within my classes, the various perspectives, was so rewarding.”

“She’s just a joy to be around,” said Andy Hoefer, assistant dean of the Honors College. “She’s pursued every opportunity available to her at �鶹��Ƶ with a wide-open heart and a sense of adventure.”

After she graduates in December, Lara said she wants to work in a field related to anthropology, perhaps at a refugee agency with which she is already familiar. With her theater minor, she might even become a playwright as a way to convey what she has discovered in her field of study.

“Culture, in a way, is a collective performance,” she said. “We perform our identities, our roles, so there’s a lot of connection between the two.”

— Damian Cristodero

Fatiha Tabibipour

Government and International Politics

Born in Morocco and raised in Italy, Fatiha Tabibipour said she has been fascinated with politics since she can remember. Coming to the United States as an au pair exchange student in 2014, she later enrolled at �鶹��Ƶ, where she learned about the U.S. Supreme Court, and was inspired anew.

“What inspired me is the history of bipartisanship, the history of believing in the law and ruling by the law and the constitution, not by what one administration wants,” she said.

The government and international politics major said she hopes her degree “will open doors in the NGO world and the government world.” She’s also considering law school.

“I want a job that can help me make a difference,” Tabibipour said, “[particularly] in the U.S. government or regarding human rights.”

During her time at �鶹��Ƶ, Tabibipour interned with the Arab American Business and Professional Association, helping research and draft communications to support their mission of helping minorities achieve roles in public service.

She also helped code and analyze legislative bills passed by Virginia and Pennsylvania through �鶹��Ƶ’s Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities and Research (OSCAR).

Tabibipour said her OSCAR research was complex and an incredible learning opportunity, as was her entire �鶹��Ƶ experience.

“I love that so many professors are very successful and come from different backgrounds from the Department of State, Department of Defense, or other agencies,” Tabibipour said. “[The professors] have not just a knowledge of the book, but the knowledge of the real world that many of us in the Schar School want to experience.”

— Mariam Aburdeineh

Cory Jack

Economics

Cory Jack, who just turned 20, isn’t about to slow down. After graduating high school in Northern Virginia a year early, he finished his studies at �鶹��Ƶ in two-and-a-half years. Jack loaded up on classes during the summer and academic year because he wanted to graduate early.

“I am ready to assume short-term costs for long-term gains,” Jack said. “If I can make it easier for myself down the road by working hard up front, I’d rather do that.”

An economics major and member of �鶹��Ƶ’s Honors College, Jack also managed to find time to intern at the White House, act as an Honors College peer mentor and work for the Madison Coalition, a political advocacy group. In addition, he received the Joseph Schumpeter Fellowship from �鶹��Ƶ’s Mercatus Center. Jack also has minors in criminology, law and society and data analysis.

Jack plans to go to law school next year. He’s considering practicing antitrust law, although he’s also interested in politics or perhaps pursuing a doctorate in economics.

“There is no doubt that Cory is a very bright and talented student,” said Jason Dunick, director of undergraduate programs for the Economics Department in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “But further, he is able to pair that ability with a high level of intellectual curiosity. I am certain those things will take him far in his career.”

— Anna Stolley Perskey

Syed Abbas

Biology, Neuroscience

Syed Abbas’ days as an undergraduate student at �鶹��Ƶ and a member of the Honors College will soon be over, but his presence on campus will extend far longer.

That’s because the Arlington, Virginia, native who majored in biology and neuroscience has created a legacy for himself after completing an impressive Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, and Research (OSCAR) undergrad research project that saw him help construct Greta Ann Herin’s neuroscience lab from scratch.

Using the $1,500 they each received for their OSCAR grants, Abbas and classmates Ali Ahmad and Paresha Khan created a fully functional lab, setting up servers and software, putting up microscopes, creating an electronics rack and perfusion system, and connecting the electronic equipment.

“It’s going to help people learn after I’m gone,” Abbas said. “I’m not the only one using it. �鶹��Ƶ students after me are going to be using it and getting research experience.”

Herin, his advisor, called him “an invaluable resource.”

“He really helped build the lab from the ground up,” she said.

Abbas’ contributions to the community don’t stop there. In 2019, he founded the nonprofit George �鶹��Ƶ Food Assistance Club to help feed the hungry. The organization has more than 100 members.

— John Hollis

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Podcast: Missy Cummings: Artificial intelligence is artificial and not intelligent

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Schar School Student Duo Win ‘Most Interesting Presentation’ in Student Research Competition

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Schar School Professor Justin Gest Wins Teaching Excellence Award

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Studies: Nicotine Exposure Increases Vulnerability to COVID-19 Not Only in Heart and Lungs, but Also the Brain

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Four Schar School Graduates Win Award from Global Training Firm Content Enablers

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Schar School’s Jack Goldstone Wins Prestigious Carnegie Fellowship

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Schar School Scholars Inducted into Top Honor Societies in a Virtual Ceremony

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Horizon Hall will be open for classes on Jan. 25

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The �鶹��Ƶ clock is back on Wilkins Plaza

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For these graduates it's a December to remember

Mohammed Saffouri Film and Video Studies

Trinidad Lara Anthropology

Fatiha Tabibipour Government and International Politics

Cory Jack Economics

Syed Abbas Biology, Neuroscience

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Mohammed Saffouri

Film and Video Studies

Trinidad Lara

Anthropology

Fatiha Tabibipour

Government and International Politics

Cory Jack

Economics

Syed Abbas

Biology, Neuroscience