'How to NOT build a Terminator' talk set set for Feb. 25 at Great Valley

Penn State Great Valley will celebrate National Engineers Week with a special presentation on robotics and ethics. "How to NOT build a Terminator," by Ronald C. Arkin will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25, in the Musser Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required at http://terminator.eventbrite.com.

As robots edge ever closer to having fundamental impact in our daily lives, more and more concerns are being raised on just what this will really mean. Arkin, Regents’ Professor and associate dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, will discuss the ethical questions surrounding the potential creation of robotic platforms with lethal autonomy, striving to answer the question of "how to not build a Terminator."

Arkin served as STINT visiting Professor at KTH in Stockholm, sabbatical chair at the Sony IDL in Tokyo and member of the Robotics and AI Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse. Arkin's research interests include behavior-based control and action-oriented perception for mobile robots and UAVs, hybrid deliberative/reactive architectures, robot survivability, multiagent robotics, biorobotics, human-robot interaction, robot ethics and learning in autonomous systems.

Engineers Week, held the third week of February, celebrates how engineers make a difference. This year, Penn State Great Valley will mark the celebration in its newly opened, multimillion dollar Engineering Education Center. The state of the art facility features 3-D design labs, electronic circuit labs, manufacturing workshop, and fabrication and test spaces.

For the first time in its 159-year history, Penn State now offers students an opportunity to earn a four-year engineering degree in the Philadelphia region. Students will learn real-world, 3-D design and manufacturing methods using state-of-the-art software and tools. Learning on the world's most widely used design and production software platform (donated by Siemens) will give students a competitive advantage and help local companies recruit young professionals experienced with managing the product life-cycle from start to end.