All posts by Sunita Pokharel, Andra Keay and Women In Robotics

Elizabeth Croft (featured 2013) is now a Dean and Faculty of Engineering division at Monash University in Australia, advancing human-robot interaction, industrial robotics, trajectory generation and diversity in STEM. Previously she was the Founding Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As the Marshall Bauder Professor in Engineering Economics, Business and Management Training from 2015-2017, she launched the Master of Engineering Leadership degrees at the UBC.

Recognized as one of the 100 most powerful women in Canada in 2014 by Women’s Executive Network, Croft also received the RA McLachlan Peak Career Award for Professional Engineering in the Province of British Columbia, Canada in 2018. She is a fellow of the ASME, Engineers Australia, Engineers Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is also the recipient of other awards such as the Wendy MacDonald Award, Diversity Champion, Vancouver Board of Trade of 2016, and Just Desserts Award of University British Columbia, Alma Mater Society in 2015. She has more than 200 research publications and almost 6000 citations.

She is an advocate for women in Engineering and has an exceptional record of propelling women’s representation and participation in engineering. As the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (2010-2015), she worked with partners in funding agencies, industry, academe, and the education system on comprehensive strategies to improve women’s participation and retention in the STEM disciplines at all levels. During this period Croft successfully increased female enrollment in Engineering to 30%.

Helen Greiner (featured in 2013), is now a founder of Tertill , in addition to founding iRobot and CyPhy Works (aka Aria Insights). Tertill is a solar-powered, weed-snipping robot for home gardens patrolling throughout the day and looks somewhat like an outdoor Roomba, one of the products from iRobot, the world’s first commercially successful consumer robotics product.

Greiner has received numerous awards and accolades, including being named an “Innovator for the Next Century” by Technology Review Magazine. She received the DEMO God Award at the DEMO Conference in 2014 and was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Leadership (PAGE) by US President, Barack Obama and US Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker. She was recognized for leadership in the design, development, and application of practical robots by the National Academy of Engineering, and was named “woman of the year” at Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2018. In 2018, she was also sworn in as a Highly Qualified Expert for the US Army. You can hear her speak in 2021 at the finals of the $2m GoFly competition .

As a child Greiner became fascinated by the robots of StarWars, particularly the three-foot-tall spunky R2D2. Says Greiner “He had moods, emotions, and dare I say, his own agenda. This was exciting to me—he was a creature, an artificial creature.” Consistently pioneering in building the helping robots to perform dull, dirty and dangerous jobs and launching robotics into the consumer market since 2008, she says, “If we don’t take robots to the next level, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do to our grandchildren.”

Heather Knight, (featured 2013) is now an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Oregon State University and directs the CHARISMA* Research Lab. In CHARISMA Research Lab, she operationalizes methods for the performing arts to make more emotive and engaging robots, exploring minimal social robots, robot ethics, charismatic machines, and multi-robot/multi-human social interaction.

Knight has presented a TED talk: Silicon-Based Comedy in 2010 where she demonstrated a robot stand-up comedian “Data” which has gotten almost 1 million views. She was mentioned in Forbes List’s 30 under 30 in Science and named one of AdWeek’s top 100 creatives in 2017. In 2017, she was also a Robotic Artist in Residence at X, the Moonshot Factory. Her installations have been featured at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, TED, Pop! Tech, LACMA, SIGGRAPH, and the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, Italy. She is also the Assistant Director of Robotics at Humanity+ and a fellow at the Hybrid Realities Institute and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow.

She is also a founder of Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company performing comedy, dance and even Rube Goldberg Machine installations. Here, she successfully organizes the annual ‘Robot Film Festival’ which awards Botskers to various robot films and robot film stars. The film archives make for great viewing.

Sarah Bergbreiter (featured 2013) as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and acting director of Maryland Robotics Center has now moved to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a full professor, expanding the frontiers of knowledge pertaining to the actuation, sensing, power, and computational aspects of making tiny robots at Microrobotics lab at CMU.

She was made a 2019 Fellow in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for her significant and critical engineering achievements, active practice, and membership in the organization. She was the winner of the Institute of System Research’s Outstanding Faculty Award in 2017 and received the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) awards from the U.S. Army in 2019. She also made InStyle’s ’50 Badass Women’ list in 2019.

“Inspired by Star Wars, the professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon made her first foray into robotics at age 7 or 8. “I tried to build a robot to clean my room,” she recalls, laughing. Now she has loftier goals. Her robots, which can be smaller than an ant and up to the size of a Tic Tac, may eventually be used for microsurgery, search and rescue, and safety inspections for hard-to-reach spaces, like inside jet engines. She doesn’t envision a dystopian world where robots replace humans, however: “You want robots to complement humans.”

She has more than 100 publications with almost 1500 citations and her 2014 TED talk about microrobotics has been viewed 1.68 million times. She specializes in micro/nanorobots and has brought impressive capabilities in millimeter-sized jumpers which can overcome obstacles 80x their height. She collaborates with experts from biology, neuroscience, dynamics and other fields to build agile robots with mechanosensors.

Aude Billard (featured 2013) is now a full professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA), teaching robots to perform skills with the level of dexterity displayed by humans in similar tasks. These robots move seamlessly with smooth motions. They adapt adequately and on-the-fly to the presence of obstacles and to sudden perturbations, hence mimicking humans’ immediate response when facing unexpected and dangerous situations.

Billard has been nominated for the Outstanding Women in Academia by Swiss National Science Foundation, where she is a member of the Scientific Research Council, and was also nominated to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. She is currently the vice president for publication activities of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the associate editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, elected president of the EPFL Teaching Body Assembly, and elected president of the EPFL Teachers’ Council. In 2017, Billard received a European Research Council Advanced Grant for Skill Acquisition in Humans and Robots.

She is also cofounder of AICA, a young start-up from EPFL, active in the domain of artificial intelligence and robotics, which provides novel software for creating safe and flexible installations of industrial robots, with a modular approach. She specializes in building robots that can interact with, learn from, and help humans. She has also been studying the neural and cognitive processes underpinning imitation learning in humans. She has over 500 publications and more than 18000 citations, and you can watch her plenary talk at AAAI 2020 on ‘Combining Machine Learning and Control for Reactive Robots’.

Cynthia Breazeal (featured 2013) is currently a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group. She is also Associate Director of the Media Lab in charge of new strategic initiatives and spearheads MIT’s K-12 education initiative on AI. She is a leading expert in designing personal robots that naturally interact with humans and specializes in balancing AI, UX design, and understanding the psychology of engagement to design personified AI technologies that promote human flourishing and personal growth.

Breazeal was recently elected as a Fellow of the AAAI Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for significant sustained contributions. She has more than 350 publications and 23000 citations, and has spoken at prominent venues such as TED, the World Economic Forum, the UN, SXSW, CES. She was recognized as a Finalist in the National Design Awards. In 2014, she received the George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Award for seminal contributions to the development of Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction.

Breazeal has also been recognized for her entrepreneurship. She is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, the pioneering crowdfunded social robot featured on the cover of TIME magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017. Her journey with Jibo isn’t over. NTT Disruption is relaunching the robot as an enterprise product in healthcare and education. Breazeal shared her experiences in a recent IROS 2020 plenary ‘Living with Social Robots: from Research to Commercialization and Back’. Make sure you watch the extra feature ‘Jibo Succeeded by Failing’ which includes the classic goodbye. We can’t wait to see the hello.