# Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is the director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, and director of the MIT RAISE Initiative. Her work has explored the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI and, in recent years, has focused on AI literacy for youth.

## Early life and education

As the daughter of two computer scientists working in national labs, she had early access to the fields of computer science and engineering. Breazeal earned a B.Sc in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989; her M.S. in 1993; and her Sc.D. in 2000 in electrical engineering and computer science, both from MIT. After watching NASA land a robot on Mars in 1997 and wondering why robots had made it there but not into everyday life, she decided to switch her focus to social robotics.
Breazeal developed the robot Kismet as a doctoral thesis under Rodney Brooks. It looked into the expressive social exchange between humans and humanoid robots. Kismet, as well as other robots Breazeal co-developed while a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, were on display in the MIT Museum from 2000-2017.

## MIT career

Breazeal is a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group. She has written several books in the field of robotics and has published several peer-reviewed articles on the topic. She also serves on multiple editorial boards for autonomous and various other robotic committees. Breazeal's work has found if we give robots the ability to perform non-verbal cues, such as those that humans inherently do every day, humans will treat and see robots more like companions and like humans. She also explores the idea of using robots to build better connections between humans, including those separated by long distances.
Breazeal has centered her work around the concept of "living with AI". which studies the impact of incorporating social robots into our everyday lives. The purpose of adding sentiment to AI is offering support to people, and creating companionship and support in places where there may be none.
In January 2022, Breazeal was named as dean for digital learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As dean, Breazeal leads in aiding to grow MIT's online portfolio, libraries, bootcamps, and identifying the areas for innovation, while researching opening learning and how different methods and technologies can improve digital learning. With professors Eric Klopfer and Hal Abelson, she then launched the MIT RAISE Initiative to research and drive the creative, ethical use of AI, particularly in the context of primary education.

### Social robots and the Personal Robots Group

Breazeal's Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab has produced a number of design projects and publications regarding social robots, covering topics such as education, psychology, personalization, and telepresence. Social robots developed in the Personal Robots Group include Autom, a robot diet and exercise coach developed by Breazeal's Ph.D. student Cory Kidd; research found Autom to be more effective than a computer counterpart in sustaining engagement and building trust and a working alliance with users. Breazeal's group has also explored expressive remote presence robots such as MeBot, whose physical social embodiment was found to elicit greater psychological involvement, engagement, and desire to cooperate over purely screen-based video conferencing or a mobile screen. There is also the Huggable, which was designed as a pediatric companion to help support the emotional needs of hospitalized children and to help support and augment child life specialists.

### AI and education

In recent years Breazeal's work has expanded into AI and education, and she now leads MIT's Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education initiative. RAISE's focus is on educating primary and high school-aged students in the creative and ethical use of AI, with free resources for use in the classroom and teacher professional development. In 2021 it created the MIT FutureMakers program, "a free, six-week summer program that inspires and trains high school and early college students how to design with AI and digital technologies to be positive change makers in their communities." The same year, Breazeal, RAISE researchers, and i2 Learning president Ethan Berman created [Day of AI, which provides free AI curricula for K-12 students and teachers and has been offered by educators in all 50 states and more than 40 countries. RAISE has received significant funding from Google, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, DP World, among others.
As MIT broadly has taken on a more prominent role in AI policyref>"MIT group releases white papers on governance of AI". MIT News. 2023-12-11. Retrieved 2025-03-14.</ref> Breazeal co-authored papers on AI's risks and rewards for career pathways in secondary education and, for a government audience, a brief on the "proper use of AI in education".

### Research impact

Academia has a standard impact metric known as h-index, a measure of publication output and citation by subsequent research. As of 2025, Breazeal's research publications have an h-index of 100, meaning she has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications each cited more than 100 times. A typical h-index for a computer science senior scholar is generally between 30 and 60. Breazeal's most influential publications are her early ones on social robots, but ones co-authored with recent doctoral students have become important sources for large-language models in health, early childhood education, and AI and ethics.

## Industry work
### Early robots

Leonardo was one of Breazeal's earliest robots, co-developed with Stan Winston Studio, and a successor to Kismet (recognized in 2006 by Wired magazine as one of the "50 Best Robots Ever"). Leonardo was also used to investigate social cognition and theory of mind abilities on robots with application to human-robot collaboration, in addition to developing social learning abilities for robots such as imitation, tutelage, and social referencing. Nexi was another of Breazeal's robots in this tradition and was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2008. Nexi is an MDS robot (mobile, dexterous, social) that combines social communication abilities with mobile dexterity to investigate more complex forms of human-robot teaming.
Breazeal has also been part of creating a robotic flower garden installation, Cyberflora which was exhibited at the 2003 National Design Triennial at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

### Jibo

On July 16, 2014, Breazeal launched an Indiegogo campaign to crowdfund the development of Jibo, a personal assistant robot widely marketed as the world's first family robot. She served as chief scientist and chief experience officer. Jibo reached its initial fund-raising goal and was due to launch in 2015, then later pushed to 2016, before finally being released in November 2017. The robot was created to enable more engaging social experiences, including storytelling and other forms of entertainment.
Jibo generally received poor reviews, being compared to the more powerful and much cheaper Amazon Alexa and Google Home. The software development kit expected for developers was never released. On December 15, 2017 the company announced layoffs and shut its doors soon after. By the time Jibo shut down, it had raised more than $70 million. Breazeal has made no public comments in regard to the closing of Jibo. In March 2020, the assets of Jibo Inc. were acquired by NTT Corporation. NTT Disruption intends to bring Jibo to the healthcare and education markets.

## Awards and recognition

Breazeal served as a consultant on the 2001 Spielberg-Kubric movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. She also has a prominent role as a virtual participant in a popular exhibit on robots with the traveling exhibit, Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, interacting with a real C-3PO (voiced by Anthony Daniels) as she spoke to the audience through a pre-recorded message displayed on a large plasma flat-screen display.
In 2003, she was named by the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of thirty-five.
In 2008, she received the Gilbreth Lectures Award by the National Academy of Engineering. Her Nexi robot was named one of Time magazine's Best Inventions of 2008.
In 2014, Breazeal was recognized as an entrepreneur as Fortune magazine's Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs, and she was also a recipient of the L'Oreal USA Women in Digital NEXT Generation Award. The same year, she received the 2014 George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Award for seminal contributions to the development of Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction.
In 2015, Breazeal was named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the Women to Watch.
Jibo was featured on the cover of Time magazine's 25 Best Inventions of 2017.
In 2020, she was elected a AAAI Fellow by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
In March 2020, during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, Breazeal and her team launched a site with over 60 activities, so students can get access to STEM activities from the lockdown to help teachers and parents continue education from home.

## Selected works
### Books

* Breazeal, Cynthia (2002). Designing Sociable Robots. The MIT Press. ISBN 0262025108.
* Breazeal, Cynthia; Bar-Cohen, Yoseph (2003). Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots. Bellingham, Washington: SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering). ISBN 0-8194-4872-9.

### Selected Articles, Papers, and Chapters

* Brooks, Rodney A.; Breazeal, Cynthia; Marjanović, Matthew; Scassellati, Brian; Williamson, Matthew M. (1999). Nehaniv, Chrystopher L. (ed.). "The Cog Project: Building a Humanoid Robot". Computation for Metaphors, Analogy, and Agents. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer: 52–87. doi:10.1007/3-540-48834-0_5. ISBN 978-3-540-48834-7.
* Breazeal, Cynthia (2003). "Emotion and sociable humanoid robots". International Journal of Human-computer Studies. 59 (1–2): 119–155. doi:10.1016/S1071-5819(03)00018-1.
* Breazeal, Cynthia (2003). "Toward sociable robots". Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 42 (3–4): 167–175. doi:10.1016/S0921-8890(02)00373-1.
* Rahwan, Iyad; Cebrian, Manuel; Obradovich, Nick; Bongard, Josh; Bonnefon, Jean-François; Breazeal, Cynthia; Crandall, Jacob W.; Christakis, Nicholas A.; Couzin, Iain D.; Jackson, Matthew O.; Jennings, Nicholas R.; Kamar, Ece; Kloumann, Isabel M.; Larochelle, Hugo; Lazer, David (2019-04). "Machine behaviour". Nature. 568 (7753): 477–486.
* Breazeal, Cynthia; Rai, Arun; Ramesh, Balasubramaniam; Chen, Liwei; Long, Yuan; Aria, Andrea; Loi, Hao; Torralba, Antonio; Bernstein, Jeremy; Reich, Justin; Klopfer, Eric; Abelson, Hal; Westerman, George; Bosch, Christina (2024-03-27). "Opportunities, Issues, and Challenges for Generative AI in Fostering Equitable Pathways in Computing Education". An MIT Exploration of Generative AI.
* Klopfer, Eric, Justin Reich, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2024. “Generative AI and K-12 Education: An MIT Perspective.” An MIT Exploration of Generative AI.
* DiPaola, Daniella; Salazar-Gómez, Andrés F.; Abelson, Hal; Klopfer, Eric; Goldston, David; Breazeal, Cynthia (2024). "How Policy Can Help Ensure the Proper Use of AI in K-12 Education" (PDF). MIT AI Policy Brief: K12 Education.
* Chen, Huili; Kim, Yubin; Patterson, Kejia; Breazeal, Cynthia; Park, Hae Won (2025-03-12). "Social robots as conversational catalysts: Enhancing long-term human-human interaction at home". Science Robotics. 10 (100): eadk3307. doi:10.1126/scirobotics.adk3307.