Word: breazeal
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...interlocutor, a decent representation of a conversation between an adult and an infant. By one measure, Kismet is a clear success: people love it. When visitors arrive in the lab, they are drawn to the robot. When Kismet engages them, they are invariably charmed. "It's human nature," says Breazeal. "They are very concerned about keeping it happy." Proof of its winning personality: a box of toys given to it by human friends, including a yellow teddy bear sent from Japan...
Kismet is the creation of Cynthia Breazeal, a postdoc in the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T. Breazeal has studied for years under Rodney Brooks, perhaps the leading figure in the world of robotics. Breazeal got the idea for Kismet when she was working with Cog, another robot in Brooks' lab that was built to have the physical capacities of a human infant. Cog has a torso, a head and arms, and it can engage in simple tasks like turning a crank or playing with a slinky. Cog is physically gifted but completely lacking in social skills...
That deficiency was driven home to Breazeal one day when she was interacting with Cog. Breazeal put an eraser down in front of Cog, and Cog used its arm to pick the eraser up. When the robot put the eraser down, Breazeal picked it up. Breazeal and Cog continued taking turns picking the eraser up and putting it down. To an outside observer, it might have looked like the robot was intentionally playing with Breazeal, but Cog's mind just didn't work that way. It was while engaging in this deceptively human-feeling interaction that Breazeal decided...
...Breazeal was uniquely suited to the task of building this new robot. She grew up near the technology-rich area that would become Silicon Valley. Her father was a mathematician and her mother a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her parents raised her, she says, to be "protechnology." Breazeal became captivated by robots at age 8 when she saw Star Wars for the first time. "I just fell in love with the Droids," she says, especially R2-D2. "But I was old enough to realize those kinds of robots didn't exist." Growing up, she considered becoming...