Cynthia Breazeal is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group at the Media Lab. According to her bio, she is “a pioneer of social robotics and human-robot interaction.” She did her graduate work at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, supervised by Rodney Brooks, and received her doctorate in 2000.
Breazeal’s best-known creation is Kismet, an expressive robotic head built in the late 1990s that could perceive people and respond with facial expressions and vocalizations meant to evoke emotion and engagement. Kismet helped define social robotics, the study of robots designed to interact with people on human social terms rather than merely perform mechanical tasks. Her later work has applied social robots to education, pediatrics, health and wellness, and aging.
She has also led major outreach efforts, founding the MIT-wide Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) and the Day of AI program, which has brought AI literacy lessons to over a million K-12 students across many countries. She is a fellow of the AAAI and AAAS.