Faculty

Peter Asaro

Assistant Professor; Director of Graduate Programs

PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Asaro is a media theorist whose work combines science and technology studies and media theory to examine the social, cultural, political, legal and ethical dimensions of robotics as media, with a special interest in military robotics and UAV drones. As Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (www.icrac.net), he works on the human rights issues surrounding targeted killing by drones, and arms control issues for autonomous lethal robotics. Dr. Asaro’s research has been published in international peer reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he is currently writing a book that interrogates the intersections between military technology, automation, interface design practices and video game culture.

His research is also informed by his involvement in digital media design projects with the Virtual Environments Group at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Advanced and Interactive Displays Lab at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the natural language interface design team for the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine (winner of the 2010 SXSW Web Interactive Award for Technical Achievement). He is currently working on an Oral History of Robotics project, funded by a grant from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The project is conducting video interviews with over 100 pioneers of the field of robotics worldwide. He has also received a Digital Humanities Start-up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to build open-source HTML5 tools for navigating and curating this digital video archive for on-line access.