Personalities of Pittsburgh: Matthew Johnson-Roberson on returning to CMU

Mathew Johnson-Roberson at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jim Harris/PBT

By Nate Doughty - Reporter

May 13, 2022, 03:35pm EDT

He’s back. In November 2021, Carnegie Mellon University announced that Matthew Johnson-Roberson would serve as the new head of its Robotics Institute — a post he assumed in January — though it’s far from the first time he’s been on the university’s campus. A 2005 graduate of CMU’s computer science program, Johnson-Roberson has returned in an executive role to take leadership of CMU’s hub for graduate students where they gain the necessary experience and education needed to become future leaders in robotics. For Johnson-Roberson, that means working one-on-one with students whose shoes he was once in himself to help turn their ambitions in robotics into reality.

How has life been since moving back to Pittsburgh?

Good, really, really good. It’s been a lot of changes all at once, but it is a very weird and surreal feeling to be back to the place you were when you were really young. I was here when I was 17 when I got started at CMU, and so it is sort of interesting and very cool, kind of a full-circle experience to be as a professor here when I was here as a student many years ago. It has many familiar things about it, but so much has changed, both in Pittsburgh and here at CMU, and so it feels familiar but also new. That’s been great. I walk by my dorm — that I moved into when I was 17 — every day on my way to work from a much nicer house now than what I lived in when I was 17, so that’s great. I guess things are moving upwards. It feels really, really, really special to be able to come back and work with many of the same people, but also to make, hopefully, some contributions to make the place better.

Roboticists often describe or liken what they do as being the work of science fiction. Do you feel that way?

I think so. I think that if you asked me as a young person, well, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I was a programmer, and I knew I loved programming. I thought I was good at that, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that. And I actually got into programming a way I think a lot of people do, which is through video games. I thought video games were really cool, and I was like, well, how do you make video games? Oh, programming. And so that was sort of as a child what got me interested in computers and I think if you think about the evolution of that, a lot of the fantasies and sort of dreams you have, as a kid who is into computers, are really around these sort of fictional worlds that have been put forward in sci-fi and in movies and in TV. And I think to me robotics represented this really unique opportunity to really think about building the future, and I think that so much fantasy we have about the future involves robots and so I think that was to me this connection.

What is unique about your job compared to other leadership posts?

I’m really lucky in that I still am close enough to — and who knows for how long — being able to work on the technology myself and work with people who are working on the technology that I get a real opportunity to try to balance two different things here. One is to think about the administrative running of the Institute and the functional running of it. But the second is to work with people here, and I think this is the special bit of the job that I really love, to do two things. One (is) to support young people who want to come on and to get into this, and one of the beautiful things about universities is getting to connect with young people who are very excited about the future. That is one of the biggest exciting parts about this role, but then the second thing is to support our junior faculty, our new roboticists who are just getting started that really have and are in a unique position.

Relative to other leadership roles that I’ve had, I think the power of imagination in this role is incredible in a sense I get to imagine other people in the future and then try to set up all of the resources they need to get to that point.

If you could be anywhere in the world on vacation right now, what’s the first place that comes to mind of where you’d like to be?

I was in Iceland just before I started this job. So the last vacation I took off and we also just had a baby a month ago, so it was the last vacation before I had a baby and the last vacation before I started this job, so I knew I wasn’t going to have much time. And this is a plug, they don’t pay me, but we went to the Blue Lagoon Resort out there and man, it was amazing. They had a Michelin star restaurant on the premises; it was secluded and had hot springs with mud and massages; and it was incredible. I would say that is where I would go back to right now.

What songs do you have on repeat right now?

Oh, I will pull up my Spotify and tell you what I’m listening to, let’s see what’s in my Liked playlist. OK, which of these are not going to be problematic? Look, I’ll be honest with you and I don’t support what he does interpersonally but YoungBoy (Never Broke Again) has some real jams, so I have Young Boy NBA here on repeat. I got some Lil Uzi Vert who has a couple new tracks out. There’s a new Roddy Ricch album, I’m listening to that.

What’s your favorite time of year?

I’m a fall, autumn guy. I lived in Australia for about 15 years and so I became an Australian citizen and that’s where I met my partner, the whole nine. But there’s not really seasons there. Sydney doesn’t really have seasons, and so one of the things you miss, I mean let me say one of the things you don’t miss is being cold all the time, but you do miss the passage of time, the seasonality of things. And I find fall is just this thing emotionally because it allows me to feel like I’m moving forward in time. Things are changing, the leaves are changing, you feel the passage of time and in some ways in Sydney, it’s very hard to know what time of year it is because it’s sunny and nice every day. Which I’ll be totally honest about, you get used to, but I really do miss the passage of time.