Cynthia Breazeal

Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT

Cynthia Breazeal directs the Personal Robots group of the MIT Media Lab. Having served as a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, she previously earned ScD and MS degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science.

Currently she holds the Life Group Career Development chair, developing creature-like technologies that exhibit social commonsense and engage people in familiar human terms. Kismet, her emotionally expressive robotic head, has been featured in international media and is the subject of her book Designing Sociable Robots, published by the MIT Press.

Professor Breazeal's present work is focused on developing anthropomorphic robots as part of her ongoing work, building artificial systems that learn from and interact with people in an intelligent, life-like and sociable manner.

Kismet using English-language phonemes and displaying human facial expressions