IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2019 - 8

ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND SOCIETAL ISSUES

Epstein, Project Maven, and Some Reasons to
Think About Where We Get Our Funding
By Timothy Bretl, Ludovic Righetti, and Raj Madhavan

J

effrey Epstein was a convicted sex
offender who died this past summer of an apparent suicide while
incarcerated at the Metropolitan
Correctional Center in New York City,
after having been arrested for alleged sex
trafficking of underaged girls [1]. These
allegations involved hundreds of incidents with dozens of girls as young as
13 years of age and went back nearly
two decades [2].
Epstein was also a wealthy financier,
whose billionaire clients included the
founder and chief executive officer
(CEO) of L Brands (a conglomerate that
includes Victoria's Secret and Bath and
Body Works) and who was reported to
have counted among his friends former
U.S. President Bill Clinton, Harvard
professor Alan Dershowitz, and actor
Kevin Spacey [3].
And finally, Epstein was a philanthropist with a foundation that "[supported] innovation in science and education." Among other institutions, his
foundation was reported to have contributed roughly US$9 million to Harvard University between 1998 and
2007-helping to initiate its Program
for Evolutionary Dynamics [4]-and
approximately US$800,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Media Lab between 2008 and
2018 [5], [6]. Epstein himself was
reported to have given US$1.2 million
in personal, not institutional funds, to
Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media
Lab, a fact that has since led to Ito's resDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2019.2943271
Date of current version: 11 December 2019

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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The IEEE Robotics and Automation Research and Practice Ethics Committee (RARPEC)
is intended as a platform to exchange ideas and discuss the impacts and practice
of robotics and automation (R&A) technologies in research, development, and
deployment that appear to pose ethical questions for humanity. With increased
awareness and controversies surrounding R&A, RARPEC is publishing a series of
opinion pieces that focus on separating hype from reality by providing an objective and
balanced treatment of technological, ethical, legal, and societal perspectives. Fourth
in the series, this column focuses on various funding sources for research and their
implications. Please send your feedback and suggestions to the chair of the committee,
Raj Madhavan, at raj.madhavan@ieee.org. We look forward to your comments!

ignation [7]. Epstein was also reported
to have worked as an intermediary to
secure at least US$7.5 million from
other donors, including US$2 million
directly from Bill Gates for the MIT
Media Lab during that time period,
with both the lab and the institution
allegedly taking steps to conceal
Epstein's involvement from their own
employees and the public [8]. Two
members of the MIT Media Lab, Associate Prof. Ethan Zuckerman and Visiting Scholar J. Nathan Matias, subsequently resigned in protest over the lab's
financial ties to Epstein [9]-[11].
Epstein's relationship with the MIT
Media Lab also links him to our community. Among the faculty of the MIT
Media Lab, from the year of the lab's
founding in 1985 until his death in
2016, was Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in
the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Minsky cofounded the AI Laboratory
(then the "AI Project") at MIT with
John McCarthy in 1959, which later
became the MIT Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
(CSAIL). He secured funding for some
of the earliest work on the development
of robot arms, and his research on arti-

DECEMBER 2019

ficial neural networks, reinforcement
learning, and dynamic programming is
still referenced today [12]. Not only was
Minsky tied to the Epstein case through
his association with the MIT Media
Lab; he was also identified by name in a
deposition that was recently made public. This deposition alleged that a
17-year-old girl was directed by one of
Epstein's associates to have sex with
Minsky, then age 73, at a conference on
Epstein's island of Little Saint James in
2001 [13].
CSAIL itself, which houses numerous faculty and students of robotics at
MIT, was drawn fully into the controversy when Richard Stallman-a visiting scientist at CSAIL, the founder and
president of the Free Software Foundation, the author of the famous GNU
Manifesto, and a widely influential figure in the open source community-
defended Minsky in a CSAIL-wide listserv email by saying that "we can
imagine many scenarios, but the most
plausible scenario is that [the allegedly
trafficked 17-year-old girl] presented
herself to [Minsky] as entirely willing"
[14]. A strong public condemnation of
this statement was leveled by MIT
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2019

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