Director, Artificial Intelligence, Informatics, and Robotics (AIR) Lab Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Chair and Associate Professor, Spelman College
Founder of the first all-female African-American RoboCup Team
BS, Electrical Engineering, University of Kansas
Master of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Marquette University
Doctor of Philosophy, Electrical Engineering, University of Kansas
Married, 16 years; 3 children
GUEST
Andrew Williams: Out of the Box
CBN.com
– Andrew Williams is the youngest of six children and was born into poverty. He was raised in a cardboard box as a baby, because the family could not afford a crib. His African-American father was a WWII and a Korean War vet who married a Korean woman with mental illness bordering on schizophrenia. In the United States, Andrew’s father worked as a garbage collector and barely supported his family.
Although his parents were not well educated, Andrew and his siblings were academically bright and disciplined. Since his older siblings all did well in school, there were high expectations for Andrew. He excelled academically and did well in sports. His brothers and sisters pursued careers in electronics while Andrew decided to pursue engineering at Kansas University. There, he got involved with Navigators. During his college years, he experienced racial barriers when socializing with whites even in Christian circles. He also noticed few minority role models in technical fields and in the classroom.
After Andrew graduated from Kansas University, he received a prestigious internship at General Electric. Soon after, he began a full-time engineering position at GE; but after a couple of years, he wasn’t challenged by his job. He left GE and earned a Ph.D. in engineering at Kansas University. Then he taught for five years at the University of Iowa and realized he wasn’t reaching the minority students he wanted to help since the University of Iowa was a predominantly white university. After completing a study and reading of The Purpose Driven Life, Andrew came to the conclusion that God wanted him to be a teacher with the mission of helping minorities pursue higher education, especially in technical fields where they were under-represented. Later, Andrew decided to accept a position at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia.
SPELBOTS
Andrew was very interested in artificial intelligence and robotics. He gave a speech on the topic at Spelman College and aroused the interest of several female students. The students had no previous courses in robotics. Andrew formed “Spelbots,” a team of African-American women who would learn how to program robots that would compete in soccer matches. Then, with the help of Professor Dave Touretzky from Carnegie-Mellon University, the students got lessons in Tekotsu, robotics programming that enables locomotion and localization (the ability to sense where a robot is in relation to the rest of their known environment).The robots also have to use artificial intelligence to determine how and when to pass the ball to each other.
The ultimate aim of the Spelbots was to compete in the International RoboCup Competition in Osaka, Japan in 2005. They first competed in the United States at Georgia Tech against schools with much more experienced students. They scored against Columbia University but ultimately lost. Still, they felt they had competed well for their first competition. Later, they qualified to compete internationally in Osaka, Japan where they competed against the best graduate level students in robotics. The Spelbots were outmatched and defeated, but the fact that they had the opportunity to compete on an international level with minimal experience was an accomplishment for Andrew and the team.
After the international competition in Japan, Andrew and his team returned to the United States accruing a lot of media coverage as the first team of African-American women to compete in RoboCup. Their story was meant to encourage other minority and female scientists. The competition also allowed the college to receive thousands of dollars toward research and robotics.
The team competed in the International RoboCup Four-Legged Soccer Competition in Osaka, Japan (2005) and Bremen, Germany (2006). They earned 2nd place in the RoboCup 2007 Atlanta Technical Challenge Passing Challenge event. In 2009 they accomplished a tie in the Championship match of the RoboCup Japan Open 2009 Osaka Standard Platform League Nao Humanoid robot soccer competition.
ROBOCUP
The core of the RoboCup competition is to advance the field of robotics (implications of robots in fields such as medicine and physiotherapy); it’s not about soccer. For Andrew, it’s about encouraging people to reach their God-given destiny instead of having self-imposed or society-imposed limitations.
“As we give our lives to God, He redeems our broken pieces and restores the function and beauty He intended to come out of the box,” he says.
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