AIRE Experts

Dr. Breazeal is the Founding Director of Personal Robots Group at MIT's Media Lab.  She is the world recognized pioneer of social robotics and human-robot interaction.  She is the creator of many globally recognized famous social robots such as: Jibo, Kismet, Leonardo, Nexi etc...   She is recognized as a designer and innovator on the national and global stage.  She received the Gilbreth Lectures Award by the National Academy of Engineering.  She has spoken at a number of prominent global events including the World Science Festival, the World Economic Forum, and TEDWomen. Breazeal is a featured scientist in the Women's Adventures in Science series (sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences). In 2003, Breazeal was recognized as a Finalist in the National Design Awards in Communication at the White House.  She is an Overseer at the Museum of Science in Boston, and she is on the Board of Advisors of the Science Channel.

Mark Setrakian is one of the world’s leading roboticists and animatronics experts. Defying the boundary between art and engineering, Mark's work in robotics focuses on fluid motion and the human interface. Mark likes to say, “When it starts to look like it’s alive, you know you’re on the right track.”

Combining his life-long passion for monsters and machines, he started his career at the age of nineteen at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, and has been developing that work ever since. In Hollywood, Mark has created innovative creature animatronics for such films as Men In Black, Men In Black II, Mighty Joe Young, Hellboy, Hellboy ll, Lady In The Water, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and Pacific Rim to name a few. Never satisfied with the status quo, Mark relentlessly pursues new technologies and techniques that push his work to the limits of what is possible, and beyond.

Mark is also the former Heavyweight Champion of Robot Wars, a seven-time trophy winner at BattleBots, a two-time gold medalist at Robogames, and the creator of the incredible fighting robots of Syfy's Robot Combat League.

Mark’s latest works are dynamic masterpieces combining his knowledge of robotics with 3D printing techniques to construct never before seen “Axis” robotic artworks.

Dr. Cutkosky is the Fletcher Jones Chair in School of Engineering at Stanford University. He is the director of Biomimetic and Dexterous manipulation Lab.  He applies analyses, simulations, and experiments to the design and control of robots, tactile sensors, and devices for human/computer interaction. His research interests includes: Flying, Climbing, Running robots.   Haptics and perception of friction and texture.  Robot hand dexterous manipulation and Telerobotics.  His invention, a Gecko like climbing robot was featured in TIME’s best inventions in 2006.  He is both an IEEE Fellow and ASME fellow.

Rudina Seseri is Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm dedicated to investing in the next generation of AI-powered technology companies. With over 16 years of investing and transactional experience, Rudina has led technology investments and acquisitions in startup companies in enterprise SaaS, IT software and data, marketing technologies and robotics. Rudina’s portfolio of investments include Celtra, CrowdTwist, Inrupt, SocialFlow and Talla. Rudina served as Entrepreneur-In-Residence for the Harvard Business School for 4 consecutive years and has most recently been named to the 2018 HBS inaugural group of Rock Venture Capital Partners. She is also a Member of the Business Leadership Council of Wellesley College.

Rudina serves as Advisor for GSK Consumer, L’Oreal USA Women in Digital, and on the Philanthropy Board for Boston Children’s Hospital. She has been named a 2017 Boston Business Journal Power 50: Newsmaker, a 2014 Women to Watch honoree by Mass High Tech and a 2011 Boston Business Journal 40-under-40 honoree for her professional accomplishments and community involvement. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Economics and International Relations and with an MBA from the Harvard Business School (HBS). She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Epsilon honor societies.

Dr. Larry Leifer is the founding director of the Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR'84) where he works with colleagues in AA, ME, CEE, CS, MSE, Medicine and the Humanities to understand and facilitate creative team-design activity.  With a focus on globally distributed product design-development teams in on campus and in industry, he is developing objective measures of design team performance (learning) under various structured methodology conditions and using a variety of computational tools.  Based in part on the results of this experimental approach to curriculum reform.  He was also the founding director of the Stanford Learning Laboratory, an initiative by Stanford President Gerhard Casper to systematically improve learning through judicious use of information and communication technology.  He is a founding member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (Stanford D.school).  He was also the founding director of the DVA-Stanford Rehabilitation Engineering R&D Center.

Dr. Li Jiang is the head of Stanford AIRE  (AI, Robotics and Education). Dr. Jiang has been doing research in the field of Robotics and AI for many years.  He was the top award: “Best of Innovations” award winner for 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovation Awards and the top award: “Best of the Program Award” winner of National Lincoln Design Competition.  He also served as a Judge in the Judging Committee for the CES Innovation award.   He is a board member of International Robotic Expert Committee for China.   His current research focuses on how AI and Robotic technologies will impact our education system and how we need to adjust our education system to accommodate the coming era of Robotics and AI.   His class  “AI, Robotics and Design of Future Education” is the first class at Stanford University to address this multidisciplinary field of AI, Robotics, Education and Design Innovation.  Dr. Jiang holds more than 50 U.S and international patents.   He holds a Master Degree on Design Innovation, a Ph.D on Robotics and a Ph.D minor on Management Science from Stanford University.

Dr. Loyalka is an Assistant Professor in Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.   He is a Center Research Fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford and a Faculty Member of the Rual Education Action Program at Stanford.  His research focuses on examining/addressing inequalities in the education of youth and on understanding/improving the quality of education received by youth in large developing economies, including China, Russia and India. In the course of addressing educational inequalities, Prashant examines the consequences of tracking, financial and informational constraints, and psychological factors of both students and teachers in highly competitive education systems. His work on understanding educational quality is built around research that assesses and compares student learning in higher education, high school and (the later stages of) compulsory schooling. He also evaluates programs/policies that seek to improve student outcomes.

Brian Yager is the head of the Harker School, one of the best private school in California. Prior to joining Harker, Yager served as Head of School at the Keystone School in San Antonio, Texas, for seven years. He was also previously employed at schools in California and Idaho and completed his undergraduate education at Stanford University, later attending Harvard University for his master’s degree in education.

Alex Stolyarik is a serial entrepreneur in the field of Education Technologies. Alex is the CEO of the EcoSystemOne startup, which focuses on making Virtual Reality teaching simple for teachers and accessible for students from any device (PC/VR/Mobile). Alex is a Principal Investigator on an NSF research project developing automated adaptive collaboration support prompts for Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). As part of the British Council's initiative and in partnership with "London Metropolitan University" MARCH, Alex established a postgraduate dual degree program in Public Administration and Planning, New Leadership in Territorial Development. The program became one of the first international institutions of interdisciplinary education for online long-distance learning in 2015. Alex is a former CEO of AFI Development (LSE: AFID), a $7.4B public real estate holding with assets in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent guest speaker and presenter at the Stanford University School of Business and a former principal lecturer at the British Higher School of Arts and Design. Alex is an MIT, HBS graduate and a fellow candidate of the Honors Program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Malte Jung is the Director of Robots in Groups Lab at Cornell University.   He is the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. His research focuses on the intersections of teamwork, technology, and emotion. The goal of his research is to inform our basic understanding of technology supported teamwork as well as to inform how we design technology to support teamwork across a wide range of settings.  He leads the Robots in Groups Lab, which seeks to contribute to our basic understanding of group dynamics and how group dynamics can be shaped by robots implicitly and by design. Malte Jung received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and his Ph.D. minor in Psychology from Stanford University. As part of his doctoral work, he demonstrated that the theory and methods originally developed to predict divorce in married couples could be adapted to predict the performance of engineering design teams. Prior to joining Cornell, Malte Jung completed a two year postdoc at the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization at Stanford University. He holds a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich and an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Paul Kim is the Chief Technology Officer and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.  He leads initiatives involving the design of learning technologies, educational research, and community development. In a trans-disciplinary project aiming to promote innovation and competition by constructing a Programmable and Open Mobile Internet (POMI 2020), Dr. Kim designs and implements mobile technologies and social learning environments.

Dr. Kim has dedicated himself to international development through education and information technology strategies and has advised Saudi Arabia’s national online education initiative, the national evaluation of Uruguay’s One Laptop Per Child project, Rwanda’s national ICT planning, and institutional advancement efforts for numerous universities.

Dr. Kim serves on the Board of Directors of WestEd, the Committee on Grand Challenges in International Development for the National Academies of Science, and the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Education and Human Resources Directorate.

Dr. Kim was born in South Korea and received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Technology from the University of Southern California in 1999.

Dr. Philipp Skogstad was appointed CEO and President of Mercedes - Benz Research and Development North America, Inc. (MBRDNA) in November 2017. With 6 offices across the U.S., MBRDNA comprises all R&D activities for Mercedes - Benz passenger cars in North America from technology research, powertrain engineering, software design to vehicle design to create the next generation of intelligent vehicles. 

Philipp is driven by curiosity and the desire to improve people's lives.  He has a track record of envisioning and creating innovative products and organizations using design thinking.  His leadership style utilizes agile approaches  to maximize collaborative learning through rapid prototyping. 

Prior to joining MBRDNA, Skogstad worked in various industries last serving as a Vice President of Design & Innovation at SAP . He was also the Deputy Director of the Center for Design Research at Stanford University.

Maryanne Wolf is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University.

Dr. Wolf received her doctorate from Harvard University, where she began her work in cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics on the reading brain, literacy’s development, and dyslexia. She has two degrees in literature from Northwestern University and from St. Marys College/University of Notre Dame.

Selected awards include Distinguished Professor of the Year from the Massachusetts Psychological Association; the Teaching Excellence Award for Universities from the American Psychological Association. For her work in dyslexia she has received the Alice Ansara Award, the Norman Geschwind Lecture Award, and Samuel Orton Award ( the International Dyslexia Association’s highest honors). For her research she has received the NICHD Shannon Award for Innovative Research, which resulted in the RAVE-O reading intervention program; the Distinguished Researcher Award; and Fulbright Research Fellowship for work on dyslexia in Germany. Most recently, she received the Christopher Columbus Award for intellectual discovery for her most recent work in Ethiopia and South Africa on the development of a digital learning experience that will bring literacy to children in remote regions of the world. This cross-disciplinary work is done in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab and Georgia State University and was the topic of three invited lectures to the Vatican Academy of Sciences under Pope Francis. Most recently she was awarded the 2016 Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties Eminent Researcher from Learning Difficulties Australia and the Dyslexia Research Hero award by Windward School in New York.