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For this week’s Looking Outwards, I watched Heather Knight’s lecture from the 2011 Eyeo festival on charismatic and beneficial technology creation — namely, how to build robots that work alongside and benefit people. Heather has a degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT, a PhD in Robotics from CMU (!!), and a postdoc from Stanford exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces. She worked in Paris for a few years at the start of her career before returning to the MIT Media Lab to work on a robot called “Kismet” under Dr. Cynthia Breazeal. This was her segway into the realm of robotics, as it enabled her to see what it meant to work on an interactive, human-like robot (Kismet was meant to be a functional robot head).
Heather is immensely passionate about “social robotics,” the study of technology with social intelligence that can communicate with us in human terms. She strives to understand how we can build robot interfaces that adjust to human needs, not the other way around. This made me realize that Heather was, in a way, a pioneer in social/autonomous robotics; she was discussing the concepts of ethics in robots and human-technology interaction way back in 2011, well before any of the technologies of today were developed!
Due to her affinity for technology, the performing arts, and entertainment, Heather started working for Syyn Labs, an creative technology group that, as described on their website, “fuses the worlds of technology and interactive sciences with artistic mediums to design and construct visually dynamic spectacles that inspire thought and provoke conversation.” There, she began working on the installation of robots in music videos while developing her own robot theater company, Marilyn Monrobot. It’s an unconventional path, but it’s what led to her working on the OK Go Rube Goldberg machine in their music video “This Too Shall Pass,” one of the most famous music videos in YouTube’s existence! Heather managed the top floor of the machine, or roughly the first 2 minutes of the video. I remember watching this video multiple times growing up and marveling at its artistic complexity, so it was really cool learning about Heather’s involvement in the project.
Overall, I think what I admired most about Heather’s talk was her ability to ground and personify robots. Robots are inherently cold, mechanistic beings, but Heather’s passion for the subject matter and artistic understandings allowed her to find a way to bring robots to life charismatically. It’s evident in her presentation style too; she’s loose, lively, and a whole lot of fun to listen to. It’s her charisma that rubs off on her robots most, and I love the fact that her projects all seem to be passion projects. Today, she’s an Assistant Professor of Robotics at Oregon State University, where she runs the—you guessed it—CHARISMA research group, which uses entertainment and artistic influences to develop Social Robots. It’s exciting work that’s befitting of her energetic nature.
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