Heavy Metal

Ori Taka, E01, G03

Ori Taka, E01, G03, leaves her office at iRobot with a hammer in one hand and a paper-sized metal sheet in the other. It's early Monday morning at the Burlington, Massachusetts-based company and the office is virtually empty, save for the occasional employee who passes by. Before long, though, the halls of the company will be filled with iRobot employees working on everything from robots that vacuum floors to those that disarm bombs. But for now, at least, things are quiet and calm.

It only takes Taka, a Tufts computer science graduate alumna, a few moments to reach her destination, a set of empty cubicles at the end of a long hall. Once there, she turns and faces a robot sitting several feet away. The robot is about four feet tall, has a small, rectangular head, and two long tire treads for "legs." It's facing away from Taka and has remained still since she left her office. It remains so even as she raises her arms to shoulder level and prepares to strike the sheet with the hammer. When she does, a dense sound, much like a gunshot, fills the halls of iRobot and the robot's head swivels immediately toward Taka. In less than a second, the robot was able to determine the exact location of the sound. It was able to find Ori Taka.

The robot, Taka explains during a recent interview, is a prototype that may one day be used by American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its ability to detect distinctive sounds is ideally suited for battlefield conditions in which soldiers are often confronted with snipers and other hidden threats.

"Built into the behavior of this robot is its ability to detect the sound of a gunshot," says Taka, explaining the demonstration. "It turns to face the shot, and then using its other features it can get the exact coordinates of where the shot came from. I've also worked with robots that disarm bombs and those used for reconnaissance. The reconnaissance robots basically have cameras and some sort of sensor suite so that soldiers or police officers can have the robot go into an area first. The user sees what the robot does and this gives them some situational awareness before they find themselves in an ambush situation."

As a senior software engineer at iRobot, Taka's job is to make the robots she works with move. Or, more appropriately, make them move in a way that best serves the user. This means that she is responsible for everything from the complex (activating sensors) to the seemingly basic (making the robots move forward). These movements are made possible by the computer code that Taka and her colleagues write.

"Basically, you have to interface with the hardware [i.e., the robot] to make something happen," she says. "So I, and my co-workers, write the code that allows the user to, for example, make the robot use its motors to go forward and climb, turn on its lights, or capture images using its camera."

Taka arrived at iRobot in 2003 and while she had experience writing code, much of what she found at the company was new.

"I knew nothing about robots or hardware when I started working here at iRobot," recalls Taka. "My experience was mainly in software, algorithms, and high-level stuff, but to be successful in this field you have to know how motors and encoders work. So, I think that the most challenging part of my job has been learning about hardware."

Coming to America
"I think we pretty much played with dirt most of the time," says Taka.

Ori Taka is back in her office. The hammer and metal sheet rest against a nearby wall, and the robot is nowhere to be found. The conversation has shifted from robots to Taka's childhood in Albania and what she and her brother did to entertain themselves. It was, as Taka shares, an enjoyable childhood but one overshadowed by communism.

"We didn't have anything, but nobody did," she says. "My parents tried to make it very pleasant for my brother and I, as much as they could. They still had to wake up at 5 in the morning to stand in line for milk or bread, and basically not get it. They didn't really eat. They just gave what they had to us. But I think the worst part of what communism did was it made you afraid to talk to anybody, even your own brother or your own friend. You were always looking over your shoulder and couldn't say what you felt."

Communism in Albania officially ended in 1992, when the country adopted a multi-party democracy. Taka was twenty-years old at the time.

But since the country had been isolated from the outside world for so long, even the most rudimentary forms of technology had been withheld from Taka for most of her life.

"Since we lived in a closed, communist county where no one could come in or come out, we were not allowed to own a computer or even a calculator," she says. "I didn't touch a computer until I was twenty-three, but I was good at math in high school, so I figured I'd do applicative math and get into computer science."

But before she pursued this discipline, there were some challenges that Taka needed to overcome. Her lack of computer experience notwithstanding, there was the issue of geography. Taka realized that opportunity for her and her husband lay outside of Albania. But getting to the United States, their country of choice, was far from guaranteed since immigration from Albania was based on a lottery system. Also, even if they managed to make it to the U.S., Taka and her husband knew little English, had only one contact in America, a cousin, and had very little money to start a new life with.

But their number did come up. Taka's husband hit the lottery. And in 1995, the pair packed up their belongings and came to America.

"It was during our first year of marriage, literally the first year we lived together, that we came to the United States," she says. "We started from scratch, but we would have had to start from scratch in Albania as well. It was difficult. But we just tried not to think about it."

The Tufts Experience
The tapping sound of computer keyboards fills a classroom at North Shore Community College in Lynn, Massachusetts. Sitting at one of the computers is Ori Taka. In a few years, she will be an undergraduate at Tufts studying computer science. But in the present, she is in a typing class trying to locate the letters on the keyboard before her, pecking at them like many first time computer users do. Somewhere, Taka's husband is working. And together, one at a computer and one in a busy kitchen, they are pursuing their American dream.

"I was planning to apply to some four year colleges when we got here [to the United States], but it was very difficult," recalls Taka. "There was the language barrier and then it was very difficult to go through the admissions process without any references from the United States. So, I started taking some courses at North Shore Community College and I got my associate's degree in two years. During this time, and all through my undergraduate and graduate education, my husband basically did any kind of job possible, from landscaping to dishwashing, to keep me in school."

At the suggestion of one of her professor's, Taka applied to and was accepted as an undergraduate at Tufts through REAL, a program which supports adult students.

"The REAL program was great," she says. "Most of the students in my classes were 18 year olds, but then you had this group of fellow REAL students who knew what they wanted to do and were going through the same initial obstacles that you were."

Taka entered Tufts in 1999 as a twenty-seven year old undergraduate, and over the next four years earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science.

Says Taka, "My experience at Tufts was great. I felt like a fish out of water at first, but after the first semester I kind of felt in place. Specifically, Professor Diane Souvaine and my advisor, Associate Professor Lenore Cowen, helped me quite a bit. The computer science department is small enough so you have access to professors like Diane and Lenore who are always there for any questions that you may have."

People Power
Ori Taka does think about it occasionally while sitting at her computer at iRobot. She wonders how a person who grew up with nothing, materially at least, came to America, earned multiple degrees, and became a computer scientist who works with robots. The answer to this question, like many in life, appears to be complex. But when asked, Taka seems to have an answer. It comes down to people.

"I couldn't have done any of this without my parents, my brother, my husband, the professors and colleagues I've worked with, and the amazing mentors I've found here at iRobot," she says. "These people have made me who I am."

Ori Taka can be reached at otaka@irobot.com. To learn more about iRobot, go to http://www.irobot.com/.

Photos by Jodi Hilton

View Alma Matters Plus Archives