Issue: Summer 2006

Snapshot

The Prolific Maja Mataric

Long before she started building mechanical Florence Nightingales, the charismatic USC professor nursed an ambition to bring people and robots closer together.

Google “Maja Mataric“ and stand back. The search engine will blitz you with evidence of an academic who, barely out of her 30s, has already produced 36 journal articles, 27 book chapters, four edited volumes, 102 conference papers, 35 workshop papers and two forthcoming books from MIT Press.

Before her pathbreaking work in social assistive robotics, Mataric had focused on teaching robots to learn from experience and getting them to cooperate as groups and with people. The field she mined for decades, with increasing success and snowballing influence, continues to inform her current work.

If there’s such a thing as a celebrity roboticist, Mataric is it. Check out the archived movie of her “Nerd Herd” in a CNN report filed back in 1995: The heterogeneous flock of robots, which she built to study group dynamics at MIT and Brandeis, follow her around like imprinted ducklings. Her smile – wide and easy – is almost as endearing as the robots.

Search the Internet Movie Database to learn about Mataric, the film personality. In 1999 director Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter) made a documentary, Me and Isaac Newton, probing the motivations of seven scientists. One of them is Mataric, silicon sidekicks at her heels.

At 41, she’s remarkably young for a full professor – a distinction she achieved only a dozen years after receiving her 1994 MIT doctorate in computer science and artificial intelligence. Today, she holds joint appointments in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s computer science department and the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ neuroscience program.

Her flawless English is another surprise, considering she only began speaking it as a teenager after immigrating to America from the former Yugoslavia.

Among her other achievements: Mataric is president-elect of the USC Academic Senate; a member of the Joint Senate-Provost University Research Committee; and recently served on the search committee to find a new dean for the USC Viterbi School.

Since coming to USC in 1997, she has enthusiastically pushed outreach programs to K-12 students – crucial work at a time when science and engineering enrollments at American colleges are plummeting. Leading by example, Mataric gives schoolchildren opportunities for hands-on experiences with robots. She believes girls can have as much fun with the electronic critters as boys do, and that the experience will stoke their interest in mathematics, engineering and science.

But young or old, male or female, anyone with a pulse will find it hard to resist her twice-yearly final class exercise, in which student-made ‘bots compete at the California Science Center in simulated rescue missions.

– Bob Calverley & Eric Mankin