Maja Matarić’s work with socially assistive robotics earns her the Athena Lecturer Award

 Maja Matarić is the 2024-2025 ACM Athena Lecturer. | Source: ACM Awards

In her almost 30 years working on robotics in academia, Maja Matarić has pioneered the field of socially assistive robotics and conducted foundational work in multi-robot coordination and human-robot interaction. 

Matarić’s early work was the first to demonstrate that behavior-based systems (BBS) could be endowed with representation and have the expressive power to plan and learn. Her lab’s Toto system was the...