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Sociable Machines Project Members

Cynthia Breazeal
Dr. Cynthia Breazeal is a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab working in the Humanoid Robotics Group under the directorship of Prof. Rodney Brooks. She received her Sc.D. and S.M. degrees from MIT in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. While at MIT, Cynthia has developed numerous autonomous robots, from planetary micro-rovers, to upper-torso humanoid robots, to highly expressive robotic faces. She is the lead researcher on the Sociable Machines project where her current interests focus on social interaction and socially situated learning between people and humanoid robots. She developed Kismet for her doctoral research in expressive social exchange between humans and humanoid robots. (more)

   cynthia@ai.mit.edu

Lijin Aryananda
Ms. Lijin Aryananda received her S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer science at MIT in 1998 and 1999 respectively. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate working under Prof. Rodney Brooks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the Humanoid Robotics Group. Her current interests focus on developing an autobiographical memory for socially intelligent robots. Lijin has played a significant role in enabling Kismet to recognize the affective communicative intent in human speech and works on the Sociable Machines Project.

   lijin@ai.mit.edu

Paul Fitzpatrick
Mr. Paul Fitzpatrick received a B.Eng and M.Eng. in Computer Engineering at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and is currently a graduate student with Prof. Rodney Brooks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Humanoid Robotics Group. He is an actively involved in the Sociable Machines Project. His current work focuses on robot-human communication through social protocols realized in the visual and auditory domains. Paul has made important contributions to Kismet's active vision capabilities, visual processing algorithms, and general system integration. (more)

   paulfitz.at.ai.mit.edu

Paulina Varchavskaia
Ms. Paulina Varchavskaia received her S.B. degree in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from University College London in 1999. She is currently a S.M. candidate working under Prof. Rodney Brooks in the Humanoid Robotics Group. Her current interests focus on the pragmatics of human and robotic language acquisition such as having Kismet learn meaningful communicative acts from grounded social interaction with people. As a first step towards this goal, she has modeled human infant canonical babbling for Kismet. (more)

   paulina@ai.mit.edu

Other Significant Contributors

Brian Scassellati
Mr. Brian Scassellati received his S.B. degrees in Computer Science and Brain and Cognitive science from MIT in 1994, and his S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1995. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate working under Prof. Rodney Brooks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research interests focus on building a theory of mind for the humanoid robots of the Humanoid Robotics Group. His interests include using robots as a tool for evaluating models from human development, machine vision, and social skill development. Although primarily involved in the Cog Project, Brian has made important contributions to the development of Kismet's low-level visual processes and visual attention system. (more)

   scaz@ai.mit.edu



         

    contact information: cynthia@ai.mit.edu