Cynthia Breazeal

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Cynthia Breazeal is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She developed the robot Kismet as a doctoral research project looking into expressive social exchange between humans and humanoid robots. She received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989. She received her S.M in 1993 and her Sc.D. in 2000 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Prof. Breazeal has developed:

planetary micro-rovers
upper-torso humanoid robots
expressive robotic faces

In 2004 she was the lead researcher on the Sociable Machines project focusing on social interaction and socially situated learning between people and humanoid robots. Prof. Breazeal also had a prominent role as a virtual participant in a popular exhibit on robots at the Boston Museum of Science, interacting with a real C-3PO and R2-D2 as she spoke to the audience through a pre-recorded message displayed on a large plasma flat-screen display.

She is the director of the Personal Robots Group (formerly the Robotic Life Group) at the MIT Media Laboratory.

See also: Rodney Brooks

[edit] Books

Breazeal, Cynthia (2002). Designing Sociable Robots. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02510-8.
Brown, Jordan (2005). Robo World: The Story of Robot Designer Cynthia Breazeal. The Joseph Henry Press. ISBN 0-309-09556-5.