My Interests Going into College - Ben Rumptz

The TED talk that I did was that of Cynthia Breazeal. She talked about personal robots and how they could be used to interact with people in the real world in multiple ways. Some of the things that she covered during her talk were robots in communication, health, and media. She is trying to bring robots into the personal lives of everyday people. Cynthia was originally inspired by Star Wars when she was a child and vowed to bring Artificial Intelligence of some kind into the real world. I think that she is a really big name in the world of robotics because she is doing some really new and exciting stuff that not many people have the privilege to do. She works in the Personal Robots Group at MIT's Media Lab. She works on developing the principles and technologies for building personal robots that have Social Intelligence.

These robots are meant to interact and communicate with people intelligently, work with humans as peers, and learn from people about the world around them. She has developed some of the world’s most famous robots, ranging from smaller robots to highly expressive humanoids, including the social robot Kismet and the robot Leonardo who expresses human-like feelings. Her recent work is that of social robots helping people improve their quality of life in fields such as physical performance, education, health, and communication.

I feel that this video is interesting because it brings together many of my interests. These interests are that of intelligent robots, programming, and helping the community. The first interest of mine, intelligent robots, that she exemplifies is obvious to people that watch her TED talk. My second interest, programming, is something that I hope to pursue in college. In order to make her robots think and act like people, Cynthia Breazeal would need some very smart programmers to create this human-like intelligence in a piece of machinery.

In my life after high school, I would like to do many things. One of these things will hopefully be programming. As of now, I am going to go to the University of Portland as a Computer Science major. As a freshman in the University of Portland engineering department, I am required to build a simple robot that can complete various tasks. Although it will not have artificial intelligence, I believe that everybody must start somewhere and making a simple robot is the easiest way to get started in the field of robotic engineering. If I like it, I may choose to transfer out of Computer Science into Mechanical Engineering. If I choose to stay in Computer Science like I planned to, I hope to learn many things, and hopefully can get a job working on things I am passionate about. Reflecting on the life that I hope to have in the future as a senior in high school, I feel that a job working at one of the major companies in the Silicon Valley such as Google, Hewlett-Packard, or Sun Microsystems would be the best possible choice where I could work my way up the corporate ladder into a possible management possition.