Coffee & Meet #19: When AI Moves a Real Body — Robotics, Healthcare & the PhD Path

ABOUT THIS EVENT

Three questions, one speaker who has worked on all of them:

Robotics — what happens when AI has to move a real body AI in healthcare — where it helps, where it stalls The PhD path — what it costs and what it opens

Why join

These are questions everyone has an opinion on and very few people can answer from experience. Join us to hear them addressed by someone who has actually done the work — and to ask your own directly, in a small group, over coffee.

Abbas built wearable robotics during his PhD: prosthetic and exoskeleton systems that had to work on a real human, in real time, on the first try. Today he researches applied AI in healthcare at Wake Forest. He will talk about what AI genuinely changes for the rest of us, which skills gain value and which do not, and give an honest account of the doctorate route — the funding, the timeline, and who it is not worth it for.

Half the session is open Q&A. Bring your questions.

👤 About the Speaker: Abbas Alili is a Research Fellow at the Wake Forest Center for Artificial Intelligence Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, with a dissertation on wearable robotic solutions for mobility and balance in people with lower-limb amputation. His work spans control systems, machine learning on real-time sensor data, and human–robot interaction.