CYNTHIA BREAZEAL
(Cynthia Lynn Breazeal)
Cynthia Breazeal was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the 15th of November 1967. When she was a child she was fascinated by the designs and robotics shown in the popular motion picture, Star Wars. The idea of personal robots as seen in the movies sparked her interest. In fact, both of her parents were scientists in California and worked in national labs. She received a degree in electrical and computer engineering from UC Santa Barbara, and went on to go to graduate school at MIT. She had an epiphany watching a NASA robot, and decided to switch her focus to social robotics. Currently, she is an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, where she founded a Robotics group at 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 several editorial boards for autonomous and other robotic committees. The issues she found growing up and studying in university was that robots much too often only interacted with other objects and not people. In addition to this, Breazeal found that if we gave robots the ability to perform non-verbal cues, such as those that humans inherently do everyday, then humans will treat and see robots more like companions and like other humans. She also explored the idea of using robots to build better connections between humans, such as humans who live a long distance away from each other. This way new types of relationships can be fostered that weren't possible beforehand.
