Entertainment

Beauty and the ‘bot

When roboticist Heather Knight began her undergraduate degree in the mostly male engineering program at MIT, she stood out — and not just because she was a woman. She was also 5-foot-11, blonde and pretty.

Needless to say, she had her pick among the braniacs. “In my first year or two at MIT, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really popular,’ ” Knight laughs. “They have a saying there: The odds are good — there are a lot of guys — but the goods are pretty odd.”

Last month, Business Insider named Knight, 28, one of the world’s sexiest scientists, an honor that flustered her. “Yeah, that was pretty funny,” she says. “I didn’t really mentally prepare! It has sparked some interesting conversations.”

Knight splits her time between Brooklyn, where she owns a lab called Marilyn Monrobot, and Pittsburgh, where she’s completing her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon.

Her work in social robotics, which combines robotics and entertainment, landed her on the cover of Wired UK’s April issue. One of Knight’s creations is a stand-up comic robot named Data, whose material was supplied by New York comedians including Reggie Watts.

The charismatic Data doesn’t just repeat jokes, he judges audience reaction and adjusts his routine. Laughter and applause trigger one line of jokes; silence or boos prompt him to change direction, much like for a human comic.

Data also takes cues from cards placed in front of him. In one filmed performance in Washington Square Park, Knight, playing the role of the lovely assistant, asks a volunteer to choose from a stack of cards with different New York locations printed on them.

A card with an image of Williamsburg is placed in front of the camera located in Data’s head.

“So, I was walking down Bedford Avenue the other day. Heather, help me with my stylish scarf,” Data says in his monotone robot voice, then raises his arms for his prop. He struts a little bit and continues, “As some of you know, Bedford Avenue is a hipster’s walk of fame. Every morning is a fashion show.”

He’s no Louis CK. But give a robot a break.

“I love being an unexpected version of what people might think of as an engineer,” Knight says. “Mixing entertainment with robotics is not a traditional thing to do, especially as an academic. I really like the idea of things being playful in addition to having a serious note.”

Growing up in Lexington, Mass., Knight considered studying writing in school because she always loved storytelling and art, but decided to follow her father’s lead.

“My dad’s an engineer and I always thought he was really cool, but I actually had no idea what that was,” she says. “We know that engineering has something to do with math and science, but the creative process of coming up with something that has never existed before and building it yourself, that’s not something I actually got to start doing in a formal way until college. Once I started designing and making stuff, then I was totally hooked.”

Knight and Data are taking their act to SXSW this weekend, where they will participate in a panel about the underpinnings of humor. This summer they’ll be back in New York to host the third annual Robot Film Festival, which Knight created.

New York is better known for its art scene than its engineering scene, and that’s what Knight loves about it. “I think there’s a very big appetite for robots in artistic settings in New York and a lot of very talented people to make [collaborations] happen,” she says.

She’s also been participating in Syfy’s new series, “Robot Combat League,” which airs on Tuesdays. On the show, she’s partnered with John Peel, a celebrity personal trainer. They battle other fighter-engineer teams using a high-tech exo-suit that translates their movements to their robot.

Knight is halfway through her doctoral program and is currently deciding on her thesis, leaning toward a project about how non-anthropomorphic robots (robots that don’t resemble humans at all) can communicate human emotion.

“My inclination is to be an installation artist more than a performer,” she says. “There are a lot of cool interactions you can make happen with machines that don’t talk but move in relationship to each other and people around them.”

Speaking of relationships, all those MIT suitors lost Knight to a bass player named Jason Denney, her fiancé. “Jason’s a musician and he’s also studying architecture, and I’m a nerdy engineer, so I like having the yin and yang,” she says.

The couple is expecting their first child in May, which Knight announced last month in a typically tech-minded way to her 4,000-plus Twitter followers: “I’m gonna be a motherboard!!! :-]”