The Personal Robots Group bridges the gap between intelligent personified technologies and human collaborative behavior. We take a multidisciplinary approach that integrates human-centered design, psychology, aesthetics, and advanced computation to create personified technologies that can better understand, naturally communicate, collaborate, and support people more like a helpful companion than a smart tool. We design, innovate, deploy, study, and evaluate our creations with stakeholders in the real world over long-term encounters to help people be healthier, happier, creative, emotionally resilient, and to learn better. We carefully consider the responsible development and ethical use of our inventions. As part of this, we actively promote AI Literacy through research, outreach, and dissemination to help kids and adults alike learn about AI in their life and how it works so they can become responsible users of AI as well as future creative and ethical AI designers for a more equitable, better world.
What We're Looking For:
Students who have a solid background in technical aspects of AI, machine learning, conversational AI, embodied conversational agents, affective computing, human-robot or human-computer interaction, social robotics, UX design, user-study design, interaction design, and/or experience with particular domains such as education (especially early childhood), K12 AI literacy or constructionist approaches to computational thinking, health/emotional wellness, aging & technology.
Learn about applying through the Program in Media Arts & Sciences.