Posts Tagged ‘Cynthia Breazeal’

MIT Media Lab develops robotic back-seat driver

Thursday, October 29th, 2009


Update 10/30/2009, 9:34 a.m.: Video added

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a robot — the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) — to offer “the same kind of guidance as an informed and friendly companion.”

MITCarRobot

The system features an expressive robotic head, pictured above, that would protrude from the dashboard. Nothing creepy there. Media Lab researcher Cynthia Breazeal, Carlo Ratti, and Assaf Biderman are working with the Media Lab’s SENSEable City Lab and automaker Audi on the product.

The robot would analyze your driving patterns, your route, traffic, the weather and other information to guide you. It would also interact with you via expressions, like a smile or the Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph-we’re-going-to-die exclamation point.

MIT Media Lab spins out two startups

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Scott Kirsner writes about two spinouts from the MIT Media Lab — Waltham-based Affectiva, which makes an emotion-sensing wristband to help study autism, and an unnamed robotics startup founded by Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, which developed emotion-imitating robot Nexi.  

Much more nascent is Cynthia Breazeal’s new company. I’ve been told that it’s going to develop some remotely-operated robotic toys, but Breazeal will only say via e-mail that she’s “doing something innovative in the transmedia space.” It’s not yet incorporated, and she hasn’t yet started pitching investors (though one VC I spoke to last week had already heard about it through the grapevine.) “We’re still working through the concept,” she writes, adding that the company doesn’t yet have a name.

Bryant University Graduate School

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