Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice

Join us in welcoming Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Mines, Dr. Tom Williams, who will be talking about MIRRORLab's work on Human Robot Interaction. He'll also be discussing his new book, Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice, where he explores critical questions at the intersection of robotics and social justice.

Schedule
~6:30pm: Presentation
~7:00pm: Questions and Social Time

---

About Dr. Tom Williams
Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, Director of the MIRRORLab, and author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (2025).

Tom earned joint PhDs in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University, and is an internationally recognized scholar of Human-Robot Interaction whose work examines cognitive, social, and moral dimensions of Human-Robot Interaction.

MIRRORLab
The Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab is located in Golden, CO. and develops intelligent agents designed to interact naturally with human teammates. To do so, the lab seeks to combine computational methods and insights from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and human-robot interaction with robotic and augmented reality technologies.

Degrees of Freedom Book
In Degrees of Freedom, Tom Williams explores critical questions at the intersection of robotics and social justice. He considers the ways in which roboticists design their robots’ appearance, how robots think and act, how robots perceive people, and the domains into which robots are deployed. The book highlights not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce white patriarchal power structures but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields.