It’s no secret that Heather Knight has a thing for robots. As a doctoral student, public speaker and founder of theatre company Marilyn Monrobot, Heather drives new insights into human-computer interaction at the intersection of robotics and the entertainment industry.
Heather completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at MIT, all the while using her spare time to rack up experience on robotics projects all over Europe. After two years working on stellar interferometry software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Heather has since taken up a PhD at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotic Institute.
Aside from coining the university’s first robot census, Heather’s research focuses on human-computer interaction and behaviour system design. It was her long-standing interest in these subjects that inspired her to investigate how autonomous robots respond to humans during live theatre performance – in examining robots in social environments, she aims to uncover more of how the application of robotics might offer new tools for the entertainment industry. Heather is the founder of Marilyn Monrobot, one of the world’s first robot theatre companies putting robots and humans alike on stage. Her robotic stand-up comedian Data, which tunes its performance from audience feedback, was the feature of Heather’s TED talk Silicon-based Comedy.
If that wasn’t enough, as a tech artist and engineer at creative collective Syynlabs Heather’s past projects include building the extensive Rube Goldberg machine in OK GO’s award-winning This Too Shall Pass, as co-manager of the top floor featured in the first two minutes of the video (if you haven’t seen it, find it now here. Go on, we’ll wait).
Also the founder of the world’s first Robot Film Festival, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Heather was named by Forbes as one of 30 under 30 in Science. Follow Heather on Twitter at @heatherknight to learn more on how technology can benefit society on a wide scale, alongside what robots can teach us about being human.