Cynthia Breazeal

Breazeal is a pioneer in the fields of social robotics and human-robot interaction. He has dedicated his life to designing and creating intelligent robots. She developed her first robot, an insectile machine dubbed Hannibal, while pursuing her master's degree at MIT's Humanoid Robotics Lab. Hannibal was intended for autonomous planetary exploration and was financed by NASA.

Some of the most well-known robots Breazeal created as a young researcher include Leonardo, dubbed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in New Jersey as "one of the most sophisticated social robots ever built," Kismet, one of the first robots that could demonstrate social and emotional interactions with humans, Cog, a humanoid robot that could track faces and grasp objects, and Leonardo.

A home robot companion named Jibo was Breazeal's first consumer product, which she released in 2014 through her Boston-based startup Jibo. The business sold more than 6,000 devices and raised more than US$70 million. The Jibo technology was purchased by NTT Disruption, a division of the London-based telecommunications corporation NTT, in May 2020. NTT Disruption intends to investigate how the robot might be used in healthcare and education.

Breazeal, the director of the MIT Personal Robots Group, made a full-time return to academics this year. She is looking at whether friendship from robots like Jibo might aid students' mental health and wellness. Breazeal's team says that everyday interactions with Jibo greatly enhanced the mood of college students in a preprint from July that hasn't yet undergone peer review (S. Jeong et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03829; 2020). That involves figuring out how to employ robots to support people, she explains.

Breazeal introduced AI Education in April 2020 as a free online tool for teaching kids how to ethically create and utilize AI. Breazeal said, "Our goal is to grow from the hundreds of students we started with to tens of thousands in a couple of years.