Williams humanizes robotics
Dr. Williams is an innovator who is working to positively impact society of the future in a way that enhances the lives of diverse communities. Dr. Williams founded and directed the Spelman College SpelBots, the first all-women and African American robot soccer team to compete in RoboCup, the international robotics and artificial intelligence world championships, in 2005 to present.
In May 2009, Dr. Williams’ SpelBots tied in the championship match at the RoboCup Japan Open 2009 Standard Platform League Humanoid robot soccer competition in Osaka, Japan. In 2011, the SpelBots placed third at the RoboCup Mediterranean Open in Rome, Italy. This year, Dr. Williams' SpelBots team qualified to competes in the RoboCup 2012 Mexico Standard Platform League competition in Mexico City.
Two of his SpelBots team members also won the AT&T Big Mobile on Campus Challenge for creating HBCU Buddy, a mobile application they designed to spread useful information about historically black colleges and universities such as Spelman.
Dr. Williams was an associate professor and chair in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta, GA. He also worked as a Research Affiliate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Williams was selected as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Speaker from 2007-2009 and selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers in Engineering Conference in the US and Japan.
He is the co-founder of ARTSI: Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact, a National Science Foundation(NSF) funded Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance and the co-Director of ASPIRE: Advancing Spelman’s Participation in Informatics Research and Education, an NSF funded HBCU-UP project. The ARTSI Alliance involves ten Carnegie I Research institutions and thirteen historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and seeks to increase the number of underrepresented students in computer science and engineering through educational and research projects that improve society in healthcare, arts and film, and entrepreneurship using robotics.
Dr. Williams’s principal research interests include humanoid engineering, human-robot learning, educational robotics, and cooperative autonomous systems and has received and helped to secure approximately $8 million of research funding from National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health/National Eye Institute, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and companies including GE, Apple, Boeing, and Microsoft.
He worked for a year for Apple Inc. as a Senior Engineering Diversity Manager in Cupertino, California while on sabbatical from Spelman College at the invitation of Steve Jobs. He helped secure positions for underrepresented students at Apple and has since seen two of the Spelman students he mentored employed at Apple as engineers and another at Google.
The robotics innovator has also been employed as an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Iowa, a magnetic resonance imaging software systems engineer for GE Medical Systems and a purchased material quality engineer for Allied-Signal Aerospace Company. He received technical leadership training from GE’s Edison Engineering Program.
His faith is part of the scientific journey, as he describes in his book, “Out of the Box: Building Robots, Transforming Lives” published by Moody Publishers and the Institute for Black Family Development. Dr. Williams is an ordained Baptist minister and served as an associate minister and co-directed the College and Career Ministry with his wife, Anitra, at Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in College Park, Georgia.
