Dr. Cynthia Breazeal is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. She is founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, Inc. and is also a founder of the education non-profit Curious Learning. She is a pioneer of social robotics and human robot interaction — applying AI, machine learning, design, and psychology to create socially and emotionally intelligent autonomous robots that work collaboratively with people to perform tasks and activities that contribute to quality of life in domains such as education, healthcare & wellbeing, creativity, and more. Her recent work focuses on building learning companions for early childhood learning that personalize to children over time to positively impact their curiosity, mindset, literacy and language skills. Through the Curious Learning nonprofit, she is applying these ideas and technologies on a novel android-based mobile computing platform to foster early literacy for under-resourced children worldwide. She has authored the book Designing Sociable Robots, has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, and she is an award-winning innovator, designer, and entrepreneur. She did her graduate work at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and received her doctorate in 2000 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
