Matt Beane

Matt Beane is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Matt studies deviance in work involving machine intelligence – and specifically robotics. He asks when, where and how workers, organizations and even AI defy norms and rules in the 21st century. Matt has done extensive field research in settings such as robotic pick and pack work in fulfillment centers, robotic surgery, robotic materials transport, and robotic telepresence in healthcare, elder care and knowledge work.

He received his Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Information Technologies department. His research on robotic surgery was published in 2019 at Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, his related TED talk has over 1.8 million views, and his work on robotic telepresence was published in 2014 in Organization Science. He was selected in 2012 as a Human Robot Interaction Pioneer, and is a regular contributor to popular outlets such as Wired, MIT’s Technology Review, TechCrunch, Forbes and Robohub. Matt also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies to help found and fund Humatics, an MIT-connected, full-stack IoT startup, and he is a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.