OTTRS Speaker Series: “Shaping Science: How Organizational Culture Shapes Human-Robot Decision-Making on NASA’s Teams”
Abstract:
This talk draws on comparative analysis of two of NASA’s most successful robotic space missions in the early 21st century, showing how they each handle the challenge of large, interdisciplinary human teams working with robotic intelligences in space, and the outcomes of those choices. Building on over a decade of ethnography among planetary scientists and mission personnel, I show how choices in organizational structure and culture have long lasting impacts in terms of interacting with their robots, producing scientific datasets, and facilitating careers. Since organizational context exerts a strong shaping effect on how scientists and engineers collaborate and conduct science with digital tools, I present implications for studies of mixed human-robot and human-AI teams in future partnerships.
Bio:
Dubbed “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet” in the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she is also Associate Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Her past decade of research, largely funded by the National Science Foundation, examines how distributed robotic spacecraft teams work together effectively to produce scientific and technical results. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How robots, teams and images craft knowledge of Mars (Chicago, 2015) and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (Chicago, 2020), as well as co-editor with David Ribes and others of digitalSTS (Princeton, 2019). A longstanding contributor to literatures in Science and Technology Studies, in Critical Computing, and in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, she is currently building a societally-responsible Design program at Princeton and serves as an advisory board member for the Data & Society Institute and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.