On Thursday, October 13, the Strauss Center hosted Dr. Nicholas Weaver, founder of Skerry Technologies, as he discussed a significant new technology that has grown increasingly prevalent in society: the small autonomous drone.

These drones are used in both day-to-day life and on the battlefield. Dr. Weaver explored the ethical considerations around the use of these drones at home and overseas and addressed problems that have emerged between what the human controllers want the drone to do, and what the drone is actually programmed to do. He provided context regarding the technology powering these drones, the practical implications for their use, and what we can do in the future to mitigate the risks they pose.

For more information on this event, contact Susan Crane at [email protected].

Biography

Nicholas Weaver received a B.A. in Astrophysics and Computer Science in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of California at Berkeley, with a particular focus on computer architecture. 

In 2003, he joined the International Computer Science Institute, first as a postdoc and then as a staff researcher, with a primary focus on Computer Security.  His research focuses include network security, worms, botnets, network measurement, and online criminality (including cryptocurrencies).  Other areas have included both hardware acceleration and software parallelization of network intrusion detection, defenses for DNS resolvers, and tools for detecting ISP-introduced manipulations of a user’s network connection. 

He also has taught at UC Berkeley in the Computer Science department for several years as a lecturer, but has now left that position to focus on his own startup, Skerry Technologies, focused on developing hardware and software for low cost, human safe, fully autonomous small drones.

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