FAI Talk — Aye, Robot! Robot Entertainment with Heather Knight

Social robotics, from the stage

The Forum for Artificial Intelligence is the UT Austin Computer Science department's standing AI colloquium. This session opens the 2026–27 schedule with Heather Knight of CHARISMA Robotics.

The speaker

Knight works across three fields that rarely overlap. She is a roboticist who has studied and taught at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Oregon State, with time at NASA JPL and at Aldebaran. She is also a comedian who created some of the earliest robot-delivered standup routines, and an artist — producer of the Robot Film Festival, organizer of the Robot Fringe Festival, a TED speaker, a featured artist at the Smithsonian, and a British Video Music Award winner for the OK Go video "This Too Shall Pass."

Why it matters technically

Entertainment is a demanding testbed for human-robot interaction: a machine on a stage has to be read correctly by an audience in real time, with no second take. The work spans expressive and secondary motion, force-sensitive interaction, and the design question of how a robot communicates intent through movement rather than speech.

Practical notes

Free, with no registration required — the Forum states all are welcome. It runs in GDC 6.302 in the Gates Computer Science Complex, and is simulcast on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person, though the talk is run as an in-person event. FAI talks are typically recorded and posted afterward.