Priyanka Srindinaghar

Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Priyanka Srindinaghar does in fact have a sense of humor; but so dark and so dry is it that of all of the thousands of people she has met in two decades of study and research and collaboration, fourteen have picked up on it. Maybe fifteen. It can be difficult to distinguish sarcasm from sincerity in the tone and timbre of a voice synthesizer.

Srindinaghar was born with eyes that didn't work, so she built herself better ones. That captures her approach to life in general pretty well. Eyeglasses were a tolerable stopgap from the age of four years, occasionally complemented by contact lenses from fifteen on; the severity of her myopia ruled out laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis. There are truly adorable photographs of a bespectacled four-, five-, and six-year-old Priya adorning walls, shelves, and the refrigerator in the home of Anjalee and Dileep Srindinaghar. Their reaction to her decision to be one of the first human beings augmented with the eyes (which she had begun designing in her final year of undergrad, continued to develop throughout her graduate studies, and featured in her PhD thesis on biomimetic robotics) was, like their reactions to many of her decisions, one of suprise, nonplussedness, and ultimate support. They are very proud of her and keep copies of all of her publications in the house, though neither has read beyond the abstract in any of them.

She is proficient on the tabla and can carry a decent rhythm with bongos and djembe. Richard Phillips Feynman is both one of Srindinaghar's intellectual heroes and one of her life heroes. She has dabbled in distance running, jiujitsu, krav maga, and yoga, in alphabetical order and among other physical pursuits, of which only yoga remains a part of her regular routine. She has neither children nor the desire to have children, nor the desire to marry, though she has entertained the notion of joining another person in a partnership to address life's challenges and appreciate its joys. The few people Srindinaghar has ever cooked for -- her parents, some other students with whom she shared cooperative living arrangements after college, rarely since then -- have been surprised by her intuitive knack for seasonings and flavors, an ability she is liable to let remain dormant for months or years at a time. On her own, and especially when occupied with a difficult or engaging problem, she has been known to go days without food or sleep. She eschews labels with regard to sexuality; identifies as female; and holds views on sex that she has described, on the the few occasions when she has discussed them at all, as "practical" or "utilitarian." She has a pathetically low tolerance for piquancy in food; she may be a supertaster.

More even than for her eyes, Srindinaghar is known for her work with the Ubuntu Collective. a worldwide multidisciplinary research effort unrelated to either the Linux-based computer operating system or the soft drink of the same name. Together with a network of teams of hundreds of other scientists, designers, and engineers -- teams including anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, neurologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists, information theorists, mathematicians, and half a dozen bioethicists -- she is responsible for the first sapient, self-aware artificial intelligence, which named itself Grace Alan in honor of Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper and Alan Mathison Turing, two computer scientists it respects and admires. Srindinaghar shares this respect and admiration for Hopper and Turing. She and Grace Alan might be friends. It might get her humor.

Srindinaghar has no pets and few illusions.