Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur.

Under the guidance of her parents, Breazeal earned a B.Sc in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989; her M.S. in 1993; and her Sc.D. in 2000 in electrical engineering and computer science, both from MIT.

After watching a NASA robot, she decided to switch her focus to social robotics.

She developed the robot Kismet as a doctoral thesis under Rodney Brooks, which looked into the expressive social exchange between humans and humanoid robots.

Kismet, as well as other robots Breazeal co-developed while a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, can now be seen at the MIT Museum.

Notable examples include the upper torso humanoid robot, Cog; and the insect-like robot, Hannibal.

In the early 2000s, she worked on Leonard, Aida, Autom and Huggable.

Breazeal is a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, where she founded and is the current director of the Personal Robotics group within the Media Lab.

She has written several books in the field of robotics and has published several peer-reviewed articles on the topic.

She also serves on multiple editorial boards for autonomous and various other robotic committees.

Growing up and while studying in university, Breazeal found that the issue was that robots too often only interacted with objects and not people.

In addition to this, Breazeal found that if we give robots the ability to perform non-verbal cues, such as those that humans inherently do every day, then humans will treat and see robots more like companions and like humans.

She also explores the idea of using robots to build better connections between humans, such as humans who live a long distance away from each other.

Breazeal is also the associate director for the Bridge: MIT Quest for Intelligence, where she works on implementing AI through grade school.

Breazeal has centered her work around the concept of "living with AI" which studies the impact of incorporating social robots into our everyday lives.

The purpose of adding sentiment to AI is offering support to people, and creating companionship and support in places where there may be none.

In January 2022, Breazeal was named as dean for digital learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As dean, Breazeal will lead in aiding to grow MIT's online portfolio, libraries, bootcamps, and identifying the areas for innovation, while researching opening learning and how different methods and technologies can improve digital learning.

She served as a consultant on the 2001 Spielberg-Kubric movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

She also has a prominent role as a virtual participant in a popular exhibit on robots with the traveling exhibit, Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, interacting with a real C-3PO (voiced by Anthony Daniels) as she spoke to the audience through a pre-recorded message displayed on a large plasma flat-screen display.

Breazeal has also been part of creating a robotic flower garden installation, Cyberflora which was exhibited at the 2003 National Design Triennial at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

In 2003, she was named by the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of thirty-five.

Leonardo was one of her earliest robots, co-developed with Stan Winston Studio, and a successor to Kismet (recognized in 2006 by Wired magazine as one of the "50 Best Robots Ever").

Leonardo was also used to investigate social cognition and theory of mind abilities on robots with application to human-robot collaboration, in addition to developing social learning abilities for robots such as imitation, tutelage, and social referencing.

Next, is another of Breazeal's robots in this tradition, and was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2008.

Next is an MDS robot (mobile, dexterous, social) that combines rich social communication abilities with mobile dexterity to investigate more complex forms of human-robot teaming.

Breazeal's Personal Robots group has also done a number of design projects and publications regarding social robots, covering topics such as education, psychology, personalization, and telepresence.

Social robots developed in Breazeal's Personal Robots group include Autom, a robot diet and exercise coach (the PhD thesis of Cory Kidd).

It was found to be more effective than a computer counterpart in sustaining engagement and building trust and a working alliance with users.

Autom was the predecessor of Mabu (Catalia Health).

Breazeal's group has also explored expressive remote presence robots such as MeBot.

The physical social embodiment of the MeBot was found to elicit greater psychological involvement, engagement, and desire to cooperate over purely screen-based video conferencing or a mobile screen.

There is also the Huggable which was designed as a pediatric companion to help support the emotional needs of hospitalized children and to help support and augment child life specialists.

She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots.

Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab.

Her most recent work has focused on the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI, and gradually gaining insight into the long-term impacts of social robots.

As the daughter of two scientists, she had early access to the fields of computer science and engineering.

On July 16, 2014, Breazeal launched an Indiegogo campaign to crowdfund the development of Jibo, a personal assistant robot widely marketed as the world's first family robot.

In 2020, she was elected a AAAI Fellow by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

In March 2020, during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, Breazeal and her team launched a site with over 60 activities, so students can get access to STEM activities from the lockdown to help teachers and parents continue education from home.