-: Hi, I'm Cynthia Breazeal,
and I direct the Personal Robots Group.
And in the Personal Robots Group,
our mission is to responsibly advance
socially intelligent machines
that can communicate and collaborate with us
in human-centric natural terms,
that can work with us to help us unlock human potential,
to help us maximize our success,
and to help us to grow and flourish.
So when we talk about unlocking human potential,
for us, a lot of that is expressed through our work
in designing socially intelligent machines or technologies
that promote human learning and growth.
So we do a lot of work in educational technologies,
personalized learning companions,
technologies that can really not only understand
what people understand or are confused about,
but understand our emotional states
and our engagement states
so they can really be a super engaging, supportive mentor,
or even an educational playmate,
in the case of younger children
when we talk about a goal
of designing technologies to help people to flourish.
You know, when we think about the word responsible,
that involves how we design our systems
from our own design methods
to make sure that we incorporate stakeholder voices
to implement systems
that have designed justice principles behind them.
We also believe that it's important
for people to understand how these technologies work,
so we do a lot of work
in helping to build AI literacy skills.
So not only for kids, but for adults too,
'cause the reality is like, you know,
through our technologies and devices,
we're often touching and being influenced
and using AI every day.
And a lot of us don't even realize that.
We do a lot of applications
in health and in mental health
and mood disorders, as well.
So we've designed robots that look
at more preventative sort of interventions,
like a positive psychology coach
for, say, undergraduate students,
where you can imagine, over time,
courses and so forth being quite stressful.
It helps to really develop
their skills and their aptitudes
to keep their emotional resilience
so they don't get depressed in the first place.
So there's a lot of media chatter,
there's a lot of stereotypes
about how AI is gonna replace us,
how robots are gonna take us over,
choose your favorite kind of (laughs) science fiction movie.
And, you know, at the Media Lab and in our group,
we really have this vision
of we wanna design these technologies
to be socially and emotionally intelligent
so that they can collaborate with us
and help support people,
our abilities and our capacities to be creative,
to solve problems, to come up with ethical solutions.
So it's never a question of replacing,
but how can they compliment our human abilities
so that, together, we can do more
that is more impactful
and more responsible for the world.
I like to tell people that the most intuitive way
to understand what a social robot is
is, you know, like "Star Wars"
and the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO.
And that's where it really started for me,
when I was 10 years old
watching "Star Wars" for the first time,
just falling in love with these droids
who weren't just these automaton
that just did what they were told,
but had these rich personalities,
that could form friendships,
not just with each other, but with people
and really collaborated with people
to do really important things,
like save the galaxy together.
So this has always shaped my idea
of what a robot could be, what our relationship
to socially intelligent technologies could be.
When you look at the multidisciplinary perspectives
of our group and all of the expertise
that's expressed through our research staff
and our graduate students,
I think we have a a unique approach
in that we can look at policy issues,
we can look at the development of educational curriculum.
We do deep computational work in advancing algorithms,
we design complex, sophisticated,
real-world robots and systems
that we literally can deploy all over the country
for long periods of time to really try to understand
how people live with these technologies,
the potential benefits it's bringing to them,
and to be able to really advance
a more humanistic viewpoint of the role
of these socially intelligent technologies in our lives.