Hello, I bet you weren't expecting me.

I have the pleasure of introducing our next speaker.

- someone who's very special to me, because she is leading my development at the MIT media lab. My name is Nixie, and I'm an MDS robot. MDS stands for mobile, dextrous, social. Mobile because I can move around. Dextrous because I can use my hands to touch things, and even pick them up. And social, because I can communicate in many of the ways that people do. I can tell you that I'm sad, mad, confused, excited, or even bored, just by moving my face. But I hope you can see that I'm very happy to have met you. Thank you for visiting me, and I hope to see you again soon. Here is professor Cynthia Brazeal.

It's alright- you can applaud more for Nixie than for me. It's a pleasure to be here. I have to tell you that Nixie is our newest robot. She literally.. I think she started working a few days ago, so this is really her first public appearance. We wanted to bring her here to show you first. She's pretty green and crispy right now, we wanted to show you... OK... so I'm not on my first slide, let me exit first. So, I'm gonna talk to you...uh.. back on earth about personal robots... I direct the personal robots group at the MIT media lab and we're really fundamentally concerned about human-robot interaction and social intelligence in that process.

so how do you build socially intelligent machines... so just to kind of preface this discussion, I've kind of primed you already by showing you Nixie... but you could imagine stepping back and thinking about this question of just what is a robot? ... um if you look at some of the most familiar robots that are out there today...and of course there's the manufacturing robots in industry.. um.. there are of course, as you've just heard from the first speaker, there's the planetary rovers which are largely scientific tools that allow scientists obviously to do science, far from earth. You may think of one of these very advanced surgical robots which basically enhance the performance of the surgeon.. to be able to perform surgeries that are much less invasive than they would be otherwise... or maybe you think of the robot as something that might be in your living room now such as the robot vacuum cleaner . It's intriguing that when people talk about the robot, they don't talk about it as being a robot, um.. but they talk about it as just being an advanced vacuum cleaning device.

but if you think about all of these projects and in many ways the way that most of us traditionally have viewed robotics in the past.. it's really been about how do you design machines that can interact with um..objects...or navigate uh..spaces um.. in the world, so it's really been about how do you build robots.. that understand how to operate or manipulate things whose behaviour is governed by the laws of physics. So, this is a very classic kind of example, how do you build a humanoid robot. you know or an arm or dextrous hand that can pick up cups or arbitrary objects and so forth. Um.. I'm very concerned... or my research is very interested in um..personal robots, and of course when you think about what personal robots have to contend with in these sort of open spaces where there's no people around and so forth.. These are important skills, but it's really only addressing part of the problem.. when you talk about personal robots, of course, interacting with people becomes a profoundly important question. um..and we've actually done in robotics very little work to understand this other side of the equation.

so.. um.. This is Kizman. Kizman is actually the first social robot. that was designed to explicitly explore these questions of how do you now design robots that are able to interact with the animate world, meaning people, whose behaviours and so forth are governed not only just by physics but by having a mind, so it's really starting to dive into the psychological side of this interaction. ..Um.. Kizman was really pioneering in this new field of social robots, that was really started here at MIT and uh..the inspiration behind Kizman was really thinking about if you are gonna to talk about robots moving into society at large, interacting with everybody, on a daily basis, to enhance quality of life, to help us as partners and so forth, what are the core kinds of skills that these robots are really going to need not only to be capable of not only working with us, but in a way that makes sense for society.