Cynthia Breazeal: Pioneer of Social Robotics

Mosaic portrait by Charis Tsevis 

Cynthia Breazeal is a pioneer in Social Robotics and Human Robots interaction.

She is leading the Personal RobotsCynthia Breazeal is a pioneer in Social Robotics and Human Robots interaction.

She is currently leading the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.

The image shows Cynthia and her robot Kismet. Cynthia created Kismet during her studies in the early 90s.

Background
The Personal Robots Group focuses on developing the principles, techniques, and technologies for personal robots.

Cynthia and her students have developed numerous robotic creatures ranging from robotic flower gardens, to embedding robotic technologies into familiar everyday artifacts (e.g., clothing, lamps, desktop computers), to creating highly expressive humanoids, including the well-known social robot, Leonardo.

Ongoing research includes the development of socially intelligent robot partners that interact with humans in human-centric terms, work with humans as peers, and learn from people as an apprentice.

Other projects have explored how HRI can be applied to enhance human behaviour as applied to motor learning and cognitive performance.

More recent work investigates the impact of long-term HRI applied to communication, quality of life, health, and educational goals.

The ability of these robot systems to naturally interact, learn from, and effectively cooperate with people has been evaluated in numerous human subjects experiments, both inside the lab and in real-world environments.