Jacqueline Kory – website N/A
MIT Media Lab, Personal Robots Group / MS1

Experience
Art: Although I haven't taken any formal art classes in years (exception: sculpture, three years ago), I sketch, draw, paint, and generally dabble in my free time. I've been told I'm good with colors. I've studied cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy. Programming: Best with C#. Decent with C++, Java, Lisp, Octave. Familiar with C, Haskell, Prolog. OSX/Windows/Linux; currently learning how to use Android phones as a platform. Familiar with AI, neural networks, OpenCV, behavior-based robotics, among others. Played with Arduinos before. Not an expert at electronic or mechanical tinkering, but I'm currently trying to learn. K'nex was my favorite toy as a kid.

Why
I want to take this class because it'll be fun. I'm excited about learning how to think about creating shared spaces and shared experiences, specifically in relation to learning-centric technologies. In the Personal Robots Group, we're developing social robots as learning companions and tutors. I think the visions of this class would be very beneficial to my research -- social robotics faces a lot of the same design challenges as any system in which people are interacting with digital information. How can this (human-robot) interaction be more natural? How can this (robotic) interface be more aesthetically pleasing and engaging? Even in our group, we have some robots in which the interaction is essentially point-and-click on a tablet. What new approaches are possible? I'm excited to learn about design principles in tangible interfaces/radical atoms, and to see how they can apply across to seamless interactions between humans as well as humans and robots. I look forward to bringing my ideas about interaction (human-human, human-robot, group interactions, etc), and a familiarity with studies of social cognition, perception, communication, and a whole lot of other cognitive science-related topics, to the class.

Art
Architecture
Craft/Fabrication
Design
DIY Electronics
Electrical Eng.
Mech. Eng.
Programming/CS

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