Seminar on Space Policy and Society
"Seeing Like A Rover": Imaging and Interacting on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission Janet Vertesi Science & Technology Studies Department Cornell University TODAY Wednesday, February 6 5:00-7:00pm Room 33-116 Abstract: For the public, the many images that return from the Mars Exploration Rover mission show "what it would look like if you were standing on Mars". But the team of scientists and engineers that operate Spirit and Opportunity rely heavily on these images to decide where the Rover is, what challenges it faces and what it should do next. In doing so, they speak of "learning to see like a Rover", and adopt both computational and embodied visualization strategies to support this robotic vision. This talk draws on two years of fieldwork with the Mars Exploration Rover team to explore the visual interpretations, transformations of pictorial data, and wide-spread adoption of robotic attributes that enable daily Rover activities on Mars, with policy implications for robotic mission operations. Biography: Janet Vertesi holds an M.Phil. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University and is currently a PhD candidate in the Science & Technology Studies Department at Cornell University, where she works on the history and sociology of images and visual technologies in scientific practice. Her NSF-supported doctoral research explores the use of images on the Mars Exploration Rover mission based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and interviews with team members across the country. With publications ranging from a 17th century lunar mapping controversy to the use of the London Underground Map to represent urban space, Janet is also active within the Human Computer Interaction community as a contributor at CHI and as a member of Cornell Information Science's Culturally Embedded Computing Research Group.
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