Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal (born 1967) effectively founded the field of social robotics. As an MIT graduate student under Rodney Brooks in the late 1990s she built Kismet, the expressive robot head that showed machines could engage humans emotionally, and in 2012 she founded Jibo, an early — and ahead-of-its-time — attempt at a social robot for the home. She is a professor at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s dean for digital learning.

Teaching the world to speak AI

In 2021 Breazeal launched MIT RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education), which has become the flagship K-12 AI-literacy effort: its Day of AI initiative and open-source curricula have reached an estimated 30,000 teachers and one million students across 170 countries. Her pedagogy is hands-on — kids should build and interrogate AI, not just consume it — fostering what RAISE calls “computational action.”

Speaking around the 2026 World Governments Summit, she pushed back on governments that focus AI education only on universities and elite schools, arguing community colleges “could certainly be engines” of national AI skills, and that MIT’s free materials exist so any country can “customize them, localize them, translate them.” She was named to the TIME100 AI list in 2025. Her optimism is deliberate: the answer to AI anxiety, in her telling, is capability — an educated public that shapes the technology rather than fears it.