Project Research

Personalized Robot Storytelling Companion

Can social robots collaboratively exchange stories with children as a peer and help improve their linguistic and storytelling skills? Teg...
Article Research

Do Robots Need a Code of Ethics?

What are the legal rights of a robot? This is one of the many questions MIT Media Lab researcher Kate Darling contemplates as part of her...
Project Research

Designing Social Robots for Elders

The increasing geographical separation and the technological divide has made it more difficult for elders to interact with their families. ...
Research
ML Learning

ML Learning
Project Research

Robot Expressiveness Affects Children's Learning

Prior research with preschool children has established that book reading, especially when children are encouraged to actively process the...
Publication Research

Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling

Hae Won Park, Mirko Gelsomini, Jin Joo Lee, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2017. Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '17).
Project Research

Human-Robot Trust

Unconventional mixing of research fields introduces a new method to study human behavior using social robots.
Research
Personal Robots

Building socially engaging robots and interactive technologies to help people live healthier lives, connect with others, and learn better
Article Research

Robots for kids: designing social machines that support children's learning

If we want socially assistive robots instead of robot overlords, well, that’s on us.
Article Research

What interacting with robots might reveal about human nature

The most urgent question for people is not whether machines will take their jobs but how machines will change the way they behave in society
Post Research

Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children's relationships with social robots
Article Research

Can robots teach us what it means to be human?

"Are you real?"If you've seen the TV series Westworld, you may remember this line. A man named William has just arrived at Westworld, a s...
Project Research

Interactive Inference of Mental States

Social robots take an active role in the inference process by producing social cues to elicit nonverbal responses from children to better...
Project Research

Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots. Many of our current projects explore the use of s...
Post Research

Making new (robot) friends: Further reading

For the interested reader:If you'd like to learn more about the topics covered in my post,  Making new (robot) friends: Understandin...
Archived
Project Research

Children Use Nonverbal Cues to Learn from Robots

When learning from human partners, infants and young children will pay attention to nonverbal signals, such as gaze and bodily orientatio...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Socially Assistive Robotics: An NSF Expedition in Computing

Our mission is to develop the computational techniques that will enable the design, implementation, and evaluation of "relational" robots...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Storytelling Companion

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language an...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Learning Companions

The language and literacy skills of young children entering school are highly predictive of their long-term academic success. Children fr...
Archived
Post Research

Kids, AI devices, and intelligent toys

What do children think about machines that think?
Publication Research

Social agent or machine? The framing of a robot affects people's interactions and expressivity

Kory, J. & Kleinberger, R. (2014). Social agent or machine? The framing of a robot affects people's interactions and expressivity. 2nd Workshop on Applications for Emotional Robots held in conjunction with the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
Publication Research

Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people

Kory Westlund., J. M., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P. L., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. L. (2017). Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.
Publication Research

Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable?

Kory Westlund, J., & Breazeal, C. (2015). Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable? Workshop on The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction, held in conjunction with the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
Publication Research

Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior

Kory Westlund, J. M., Martinez, M., Archie, M., Das, M., & Breazeal, C. (2016). Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior. In S. Y. Okita, T. Shibata, & B. Mutlu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 688-693). IEEE: Washington, DC.
Publication Research

Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative

Kory Westlund, J., Jeong, S., Park, H. W., Ronfard, S., Adhikari, A., Harris, P. L., David DeSteno, & Breazeal, C. (2017). Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Publication Research

A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people

Kory Westlund, J., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. (2015). A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people. In Proceedings of New Friends: The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education.
Project Research

Tega: A New Platform for Long-term Interaction

Tega is a new robot platform designed to support long-term, in-home interactions with children, with applications in early-literacy educa...
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Language Learning Companions

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and c...
Archived
Project Research

EngageME

Machine Learning and Humanoid Robots for Measuring Engagement of Children with AutismEngageME is a project aimed at building a new techno...
Project Research

Robot Mindset and Curiosity

A growth mindset and curiosity have significant impact on children's academic and social achievements. We are developing and evaluating a...
Publication Research

Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer

Hae Won Park, Rinat Rosenberg-Kima, Maor Rosenberg, Goren Gordon, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2017. Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '17). ACM, New York
Publication Research

Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging spam

Almaatouq, Abdullah, et al. "Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging spam." Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science. ACM, 2014.