Matt Beane

Assistant Professor, Technology Management (he/ him)

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.

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Research

My current, nationwide research program is focused on the introduction of AI-enabled robots in repetitive, manual work. In particular, my research team and I are asking how and why organizations and front-line workers are adapting particularly constructively to these technologies.

Academic Publications

Beane, M. 2020. In Storage, Yet on Display: An Empirical Investigation of Robots' Value as Social Signals. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI ’20: 83–91.

Beane, M. 2019. Shadow Learning: Building Robotic Surgical Skill When Approved Means Fail. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 87–123.

Beane, M. 2019. Learning to Work with Intelligent Machines. Harvard Business Review, 97(5), 140- 149.  

Johnson, M., Beane, M., Mindell, D., & Ryan, J. 2019. Knowledge Management for Rapidly Extensible Collaborative Robots. International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, (pp. 503– 523).

Jung, M. F., Beane, M., Forlizzi, J., Murphy, R., & Vertesi, J. (2017). Robots in Group Context: Rethinking Design, Development and Deployment. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1283–1288.

Beane, M. and W. Orlikowski. 2015. What Difference Does a Robot Make? The Material Enactment of Distributed Coordination. Organization Science 26 (6), 1553-1573 Bettinelli, M., Y. Lei, M.

Beane, M. C. Mackey, T. N. Liesching. 2015. Does Robotic Telerounding Enhance Nurse–Physician Collaboration Satisfaction About Care Decisions? Telemedicine and e- Health

Shen, S., Admoni, H., Harriott, C., Kim, Y., Marge, M., Vázquez, M., Beane, M. … Vozar, S. (2013). HRI Pioneers Workshop 2013. 2013 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 439–440.

Popular Publications
Speaking and Consultation

I speak on how we're adapting to intelligent technologies, and how we could. Recent invitations include EmTech Next, MIT Tech Review and Harvard Business Review's joint annual summit on technology and business. 

I am a listed speaker with the Stern Speakers agency; please contact them directly if you are interested in my services.