Media Lab Professor Cynthia Breazeal, head of the Personal Robots research group, has been named to the inaugural TIME100 AI list in the 2025 Thinkers category. Professor Breazeal, who is also Dean for Digital Learning at MIT Open Learning and director of MIT RAISE, is a pioneer in social robotics whose work has been instrumental in developing curricula to help children (and their teachers) understand artificial intelligence. 

Through Day of AI, which MIT RAISE launched in 2021, Professor Breazeal and her colleagues have reached some 30,000 teachers and 1 million students worldwide. Its open source AI literacy programs are aimed at K–12 learners, helping them learn how AI tools work, what they're most useful for, and what their limitations are.  

MIT RAISE has also developed an AI hackathon, a summer program, and other offerings that empower students to design their own AI applications. 

“[Humans] are deeply social, emotional, cognitive, multidimensional creatures,” she says. “The more that we can design technologies that support all of us, the more deeply we can engage, and not surprisingly, the more successful we are."