Know Your Roboticist : Heather Knight
Monday, April 11th, 2011
Heather & Nao - photo from Carnegie Mellon
Heather Knight is currently a PhD student at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. Before getting to Carnegie Mellon she studied at MIT and even worked at Aldebaran Robotics for a while.
She was kind enough to answer a few questions for us for National Robotics Week.
RL: When you were at MIT did you get a chance to work with Kismet or any of the other cool social robots?
HK: I actually have a playlist of some of my favorite social robot videos, including several I’ve worked on, here: YouTube/Marilyn Monrobot.
As a freshman at MIT, I became a student researcher at Dr. Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robotics Group. She is the creator of Kismet , and founder of the field of social robots. You can read her seminal book on the subject, Designing Social Robots. That book is one of my favorites, right up there with Clifford Nass’s The Media Equation and Rosalind Picard’s Affective Computing.
Feel free to flip through some of the social robot, artistic and technical projects I’ve worked on on MarilynMonrobot.com’s project page. Cyberflora and the Sensate Bear, part of the Huggable Project, were particularly seminal for me.
Tags: aldebaran robotics, carnegie mellon, Heather Knight, MIT, nao, national robotics week, robogames
