Kim BINSTED: “The Journey to Mars: The risks of long-duration human space exploration, and how we are overcoming them”

Professor Kim Binsted, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Hawaii, will have a Monday seminar titled “The Journey to Mars: The Risks of Long-Lasting Human Space Exploration, and How We Are Overcoming Them.”

Long space journeys, such as the trip to Mars, pose unique risks to the human body and mind. I will describe efforts by myself and others to mitigate those risks and enable long-duration human space exploration. In particular, I will discuss research conducted at HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, hi-seas.org).

Kim Binsted received her BSc in Physics at McGill (1991), and her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1996). Her thesis topic was the computational modeling and generation of punning riddles, and her program, JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine), generated puns such as “What do you call a Martian who drinks beer? An ale-ien!”. She then went to Japan, where she conducted research at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories on human-computer interfaces, and then started a company, I-Chara KK, which developed social software agents for mobile phones. In 2002, she joined the faculty of the Information and Computer Sciences Department at the University of Hawaii, where she does research on artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, and long-duration human space exploration. In 2015, she received a MS in Planetary Geology, for attempting to characterize the deuterium-hydrogen ratio in the primitive Earth mantle.

Welcome!