Heather Knight
Ep. 30 — An acting class convinces an engineering student to devote her career to building charismatic, performing, social robots / Heather Knight Associate Professor of Robotics, Oregon State University. When Heather Knight was working on her Ph.D. in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, a two-week class she took in the drama department, called Movement for Actors totally detoured her thesis plans. And it became the heart and soul of her life and work: Helping robots become more like humans. Little did she know how difficult it would be. “I literally spent the next three years trying to get a robot to communicate by emotion, in a way that was similar to the first two weeks of that class,” Knight recalls. But Knight was hooked. Since then, she has devoted her career to becoming a social roboticist. She specializes in building emotional, useful, so-called “charismatic” robots. These robots are “charismatic” in more ways than one. Knight’s lab at Oregon State University is called The CHARISMA Robotics Lab. CHARISMA is an acronym for Collaborative Humans and Robots: Interaction Sociability, Machine learning, & Art. Knight and her team get wildly creative with robots, infusing them not only with smarts but also sociability, charm, humor, practicality, and collaborativeness. In other words, human traits. If anyone can do it, it’s Knight. In addition to her Ph.D. in Robotics, Knight also has degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. Fiercely smart with a capacity for goofy, artsy and playful, Knight has worked as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helped build wildly popular interactive installations including the crazy Rube Goldberg machine in OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” music video, which has nearly 64 million views! She has served as a Robotics Artist in Residence and as an Artist/Engineer. She’s done a TedTalk with her robotic standup comedian, Data. And she’s a sought-after thought leader in her field. Knight also runs Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company where she does comedy performances with Data and even organizes an annual Robot Film Festival. The more Knight works with robots, the more she has come to understand an immutable truth: Humans are awesome. “One of the things that I love about what I do, is that I constantly get to kind of bask in the glory of all of the things that we take for granted. Like it's so hard for autonomous cars to actually make sense of the world. And we can see a path through a forest just because of how the leaves are slightly more beaten down, even though there are pine needles and rocks. Our vision systems are absolutely amazing,” Knight says. “And our ability to feel like that someone isn't trustworthy in like 30 seconds or like judge a job interview or decide who to talk to at a party. It’'s very cool what we're capable of, I mean, I don't know if there's life in the extended universe, but we are very rare and unique and lucky.” Tanscript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: Her dad is a former engineer who built lasers and propulsion systems. Her mom is a multilingual former Peace Corps volunteer. Heather Knight has molded his mind and her heart into a very unique field of robotics, building emotional, playful, social robots. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Good Story, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Chitra Ragavan: Joining me now is Heather Knight, Assistant Professor of Robotics at Oregon State University. Her charisma research group uses methods from entertainment to bootstrap the development of social robots. Knight also runs Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company with comedy performances and an annual robot film festival. Knight was named to the Forbes :ist 30 under 30 in science, in 2011 and Ad Week's top 100 creatives in 2017. Heather, welcome to the podcast.