Cynthia Breazeal reflects on earning 2024 Robotics Medal from MassRobotics

MassRobotics, a robotics innovation organization, recently announced Dr. Cynthia Breazeal as the 2024 recipient of its Robotics Medal. The organization said Breazeal won for her significant contributions to the field of robotics, notably for her work in the field of social robotics and human-robot interaction. The award is sponsored by Amazon Robotics. The award includes a $50,000 prize. 

With the Robotics Medal, MassRobotics seeks to not only celebrate individual achievements, but also to inspire and encourage women and other underrepresented groups to participate in shaping the future of the world through robotics.

Breazeal is currently a 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 also the MIT dean for digital learning, where she leads Open Learning’s business and research and engagement units. 

A history with social robots

Breazeal work at MIT, however, is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her accomplishments. She is a pioneer of social robotics and human-robot interaction. Her work balances technical innovation in AI, user experience (UX) design, and understanding the psychology of engagement to design personified AI technologies that promote human flourishing and personal growth.

In 2012, Breazeal founded Jibo, a social robotics company named after its flagship product. Jibo could see with two hi-res cameras, which allowed it to recognize and track faces, take pictures, and enable video calling.

Despite raising nearly $72 million in venture capital and raising more than $3.5 million in a 2014 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, the company shut down in 2018.

Breazeal’s more recent work focuses on the idea of “living with AI” and understanding the long-term potential for social robots to build relationships and provide personalized support as companions in daily life. Her research group actively investigates social robots applied to education, pediatrics, health and wellness, and aging.

“I really just see myself as this year’s representative of all the amazing women. It’s a combination of their brilliance and their originality, but also their humanity and in so many ways their deep sense of service that they bring to their work,” Breazeal told The Robot Report. “I am thrilled to be this year’s representative, but I really do see myself as just a part of a world of incredible women.”

Editor’s note: There will be a ticketed Women in Robotics luncheon as part of RoboBusiness 2024 this week in Santa Clara, Calif.

Register now.

Breazeal sees award as a call to service

Not only is there still a gender gap within robotics, but Breazeal said there’s also a visibility gap for the women already within the industry. There are many trailblazing women in robotics, she said, but they’re often not chosen to keynote events or thought of as the face of robotics. 

“When you’re a woman in this field, you have to recognize there are so many amazing women doing incredible work,” Breazeal said. “And I really do applaud this particular award, because I do feel so many of the women in the field, we can be very prominent, but in a lot of ways we’re kind of the best-kept secret.”

While the award is an honor, Breazeal said that she also sees it as a call to service. This means using her position to elevate other women and other people from underrepresented groups in the industry. 

“How can I think about this award in terms of service to my community and to the world?” Breazeal asked.

She also noted that she wouldn’t be where she is without the wonderful people she has worked with throughout her career, including the students she teaches and mentors at MIT. 

“MIT is a world-class research university,” Breazeal said. “The work that you see is the product of brilliant students. You give them these opportunities to immerse themselves in these questions.”

“So, not only are we creating these amazing robot systems, but we’re also helping to foster, and nurture, incredible, brilliant young talent who have come out of this program,” she said. 

A validating moment for the social robotics field

In addition to being a milestone in her career, Breazeal said she also sees the award as a validating moment for the entire field of social robotics, which has now existed for 25 years. As a pioneer in the field, Breazeal saw firsthand the many detractors when the technology was in its early stages. 

“It’s kind of an atypical lens on robots,” Breazeal said. “Nobody was really thinking deeply about what it would mean for anyone, everyday people, to actually interact with robots. I mean, of course, we had science fiction and all these visions and so forth. But people weren’t really thinking about anyone beyond the non-expert being able to have value, or the non-commercial really being able to have value from this autonomous robot technology.”

She acknowledged that new ideas always draw skepticism, and the social robots had some big-name detractors early on. Breazeal recalled her work on Kismet, which some observers have called the first social robot, for her doctoral work at the MIT AI Lab in the late 1990s. At the time, she said, there were some people industry who doubted the benefits of “having a robot that could smile,” as they put it.

Kismet didn’t resemble the cute, approachable form factors that are often associated with social robots, but it could enter into social-emotional interactions with a human caregiver, reminiscent of parent-infant exchanges. These more natural interactions could be used to bootstrap the social-emotional-cognitive development of social robots, explained Breazeal.

She said knew that those detractors simply didn’t understand what she was trying to do. Fortunately, Breazeal had support from enough of the community to keep going. 

“Once we kind of got past those first friction points and started getting this nascent community together, it just became increasingly obvious that, of course, this is important,” Breazeal said.

“It is so incredibly rewarding that someone in social robotics received this honor,” she continued. “It just made the point that this field of human-robot interaction, social robotics, has become such an important part of the overall field of robotics.”