Thomas Burns

Thomas Burns, Assistant Director of Facilities and Infrastructure, joined the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) in 2023: “When I first visited CICS to interview for the position, I remember the strange feeling that I had come home.” 

Prior to relocating to the Amherst area to work at UMass, Burns spent most of his adult life living overseas in Eastern Europe and working in the motion picture industry, primarily on documentary films. In 2009, he spent a year as a U.S. Fulbright Fellow in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, teaching at several universities in the region.

Today, Burns oversees all the hardware and physical networking resources for the college, as well as the expansion of the CICS Makerspace. In his free time, he builds robots and shares his creations on his YouTube channel, which has amassed 124K subscribers.

When did you first begin creating content about your research and work?

Our family ran a small electronics repair business overseas in Tbilisi, Georgia. My daughter Mariam and I had been spending so much time together fixing other people’s tech that we decided to open a business, which turned out to be such a wonderful adventure for our family.

Around this time, I also became very interested in Soviet-made electronics: Cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions from Ukraine, analog synthesizers from Estonia, and all sorts of other devices from around the USSR, many of which can still be found in Tbilisi’s outdoor markets. It was an entire universe of electronic devices that were developed largely independently from what was being developed in Western Europe and the U.S. Their design was foreign to me, and fascinating.

Soviet-made electronics are disappearing, unfortunately—like a hopelessly endangered species. I wanted to share their beauty with the world before it was too late, so I started a YouTube channel to feature some of my restorations. Over time, these videos evolved to include other electronics projects and, lately, robotics.

Your video, “The coolest robot I’ve ever built,” amassed an impressive 5 million views on YouTube. What was it like to watch your creation—both the bot, and your video—go viral?

That project was a lot of fun—challenging, but very rewarding. In essence, it was a case study of human-computer interaction, which is something I think a lot about these days, especially in the context of robotics. YouTube, it turns out, can be a very effective tool for building community around one’s creative practice. There’s an ancient African proverb that I keep coming back to: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.” This spirit of collaboration is one of the things I love most about working in CICS.

Storytelling is essentially a force multiplier for ideas. It allows them to breathe and propagate and inspires others to iterate on what you’ve done. After publishing that particular video, I shared a tutorial for the build online and every so often, someone sends me a link to their own version of the robot. What’s really wonderful here is that every single one of these makers took some aspect of my build and made it better—that never would have happened if I had built the project in isolation and left it to gather dust. So, it feels like there should always be a sort of dance taking place between working on ideas and working on telling the story of these ideas. It’s finding the right balance that’s the tricky part.

Can you walk us through your creative process, from concepting to creating?

I find that the best ideas are usually simple and accessible in their final design, which sounds natural enough on paper, but it’s actually incredibly difficult to achieve in practice because the path to that final design can be so arduous and complex.

Of course, I don’t have a secret recipe, and it feels like my own research and design processes are full of false starts, frustrating setbacks, and dead ends. I have noticed, however, that the stories behind nearly all big breakthroughs share some common elements: namely iteration, perseverance, and failure. For me, success is mostly about failing at bigger and bigger things.

I’m inspired by those who are curious about the world around them and who aren’t afraid to pursue ideas when the answers are still unclear. This curiosity is the beating heart of CICS, and having so many colleagues who share these values is why I love working here so much.

Is there anything you’re currently working on?

There are so many projects, and so little time. On the weekends I’ve been designing a greeter robot for CSCF—a machine that could meet faculty, students, and staff when they come down to our offices seeking help. The finish line for this build still feels like it’s years away, but as a learning experience it’s been very rewarding. Hao Zhang, one of our college’s robotics professors, has been patient enough to entertain my many naive questions about robotics as I try to navigate these waters.

How do you compute for the common good?

One of the most rewarding parts of my job here in CICS is overseeing the college’s physical computing makerspace. In anticipation of its move to our new building in the fall, we’ve been ramping up our support for HackUMass and Hack(H)er413—two big hackathons at UMass that bring together hundreds of students for a weekend of ideation, collaboration, hacking, and prototyping. What I love most about hackathon projects is how many of them are focused explicitly on making the world a better place, on lifting people up. This is also what I see as the end goal of the work our group does in CSCF. Yes, there’s the daily hustle of keeping our networks safe, making sure our server rooms are healthy, and putting out the dozens of other fires that come up every week, but at the end of the day, the goal of all of this work—all of this infrastructure—is to empower our faculty to do their best research, to provide our staff the tools they need to succeed at their jobs, and to give our students the freedom to dream big and swing for the fences.

What do you think the future of computing science looks like?

If only we knew! Things are moving so quickly now, it feels more difficult than ever to make predictions. But I do have the sense that we are approaching an inflection point, and one that is driven largely by computing science. Five hundred years from now, I think we will look back on where we are today as one of the most consequential moments in the history of our species, primarily because two critical events have happened inside a 50-year window. The first, of course, is the dawn of AI. The second, which happened only a few decades ago, is when computers came into the lives of ordinary people, into our homes.

Many people are fearful about what AI will bring. I’m not fearful—I’m optimistic. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges to overcome, but if you look back on the inventions that have been the most influential in our history—the printing press, the steam engine, radio, television, etc.—most of these were met with fear, but almost always ended up being a net positive development for humanity. I have faith that we will figure out how to live productively with AI; after all, there has never been a better time to be human than right now.