The Pittsburgh Kids+Creativity Network hosted a Lunch & Learn with Illah Nourbakhsh on Wednesday, May 22 at Assemble. Watch the video above to see the full talk, as well as questions from the audience.

Nourbakhsh, a Robotics Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the CREATE Lab, a research and design lab exploring socially meaningful innovation and deployment of robotic technologies, is also the author of Robot Futures, recently published by MIT Press.

Speaking to an audience of educators, researchers & tech developers, artists & designers, and community members, Nourbakhsh discussed the convergence of robotics, Big Data, and community empowerment, including how it’s shaping a new discourse regarding the role of education in directing community change, and the role of communities in directing the future of technology innovation.

Describing his talk, Nourbakhsh put it this way:

[blockquote style=”normal”] Robotics is undergoing a major transformation, and this transformation in turn will change how robotic technologies apply to education and engage learners of all ages.  Robots aren’t walking, talking humanoids any longer. Now, they crawl through riverbeds and measure water pollution; they correlate asthma attacks with particulate matter in the air; they capture high-resolution imagery of archeology sites and bring the sites right into the middle school classroom. In this talk, I will describe the convergence of robotics, Big Data and community empowerment: how it’s shaping a new discourse regarding the role of education in directing community change, and the role of communities in directing the future of technology innovation.  We will describe key trends in technology that will be on-line in the next decade, explaining how new affordances in the 2020′s will affect the practice of education and home-school integration.[/blockquote]