Heather Knight and Data peforming (via NAte Lanxon & O2)
For anyone who is a fan of the S.T.E.A.M. field (Science, tech, engineering, art, math - who here isn’t a fan?), an up and coming leader in the field has been making waves since she completed her bachelors in electrical engineering. Heather Knight is a rising roboticist that is blurring the line between the sciences and the arts and bringing it all to the social mainstream. For any ladies looking to get into the hard sciences and making it part of more meaningful endeavors, Heather Knight is a great role model to have. Actually, anyone interested in tech, engineering and art could benefit from following in Ms. Knights footsteps (I know I could).
Knight has been studying many aspects of robotics since she graduated from high school in 2001. Most likely, somewhere between her travels to Latin America and completing her M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT she became a social roboticist. Now she runs Marilyn Monrobot in New York City, a firm that organizes designs and promotes projects and events focused on the subject of robotics and art.
Among events, she has helped realize is the Robot Film Festival, which will be held for the third time this year and has featured acts like Reggie Watts and Robot Cowboy. She also hosts the Cyborg Cabaret, which again plays into the theme of robots being integrated into the lives of humans.
Her involvement can also be seen combined with other art forms like when she helped design the Rube Goldberg machine for OK Go’s music video, “This too shall pass.” But her technical skills match her artistic visions. These skills have contributed to numerous projects at MIT, Syyn Labs, Siemens and even NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab where she helped develop robotics and stellar interferometry software.
While taking on all of these projects so passionately, she continues her studies and is now completing her research as a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. One of her newest robotic companions is a robot named Data. Data has visual and auditory sensors that allow it to react to the audience while it is performing. This is helpful because Data is a robot comedian that will get by on making people laugh, not boo. Using its senses and algorithms, it can dynamically choose what jokes to tell next.
Her impressive list of achievements got her the opportunity to speak at TEDWomen in 2010, they landed Knight on the Forbes’ list of 30 under 30, and they have now helped her and Data get on the 2013 April cover of Wired Magazine.
In a talk, she gave at Wired 2011, Knight says, "I think that if we design better social interfaces with technologies, we can more fulfil our capacity for being human." That mission is undoubtedly something to become a part of our lives.
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