We're coming to you  from Pittsburgh, where GeekWire is reporting on the future of robotics, AI and automation this week in conjunction with the Cascadia Connect Robotics, Automation & AI conference, organized by Seattle-based Cascadia Capital, which is underwriting our independent coverage of this topic.

This week's podcast is with Matthew Johnson-Roberson, the director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, which has been the source of numerous breakthroughs in robotics and automation since its founding in the late 1970s. Johnson-Roberson spent part of his childhood in Seattle, where he went to Garfield High School. He was a CMU computer science undergrad who went on to get his doctorate in robotics at the University of Sydney and worked at the University of Michigan before returning to CMU as the leader of the Robotics Institute earlier this year.