Cynthia Breazeal

PBS recently aired on it's brilliant NOVA ScienceNOW program a profile of MIT Professor Cynthia Breazeal. Professor Brezeal founded the Personal Robots Group (formerly called the Robotic Life Group) and is well known for creating emotive and expressive robots for interaction with humans. One of her most famous creations is Kismet. Other pretty awesome creations include Leonardo (pictured above alongside Stan Winston and Prof. Breazeal) and RoCo. See the NOVA ScienceNOW profile video on PBS' website here

Well, this will sure take interacting with your computer to a whole new level. Cynthia Brezeal, head of the MIT Media Lab's Robotic Life group and creator of Kismet, has been working on an expressive interactive robotic computer aptly named RoCo. RoCo is able to move its head (the monitor) in a rather animated fashion, in response to social cues from the user. For example, if the user slouches on his/her chair, RoCo responds by shaking it's head in utter disapproval, just like my mom. This video shows RoCo in action. It's quite entertaining to watch.. yess, we at waziwazi do have a life!