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Past Member

Randi Williams

Former Research Assistant
Contact Information:
Groups
  • Personal Robots

Dr. Randi Williams completed her Ph.D. studying human-robot interaction and preK-12 education in the Personal Robots group. She is affiliated with MIT's RAISE initiative and a founding director of the Boston chapter of Black in Robotics. She received a doctorate from the Media Lab in 2024, a Master's in Media Arts in Sciences from MIT in 2018, and a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering from UMBC in 2016. 

Randi strives to prepare the next generation of ethical  engineers to use AI to solve pressing issues in their communities. Her projects on social robot learning companions (PopBots) and grade school AI + ethics curricula, (How to Train Your Robot) have  received coverage from outlets such as The Atlantic, Wired, and the MIT Tech Review. She has received numerous awards, including the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, Cambridge Curious Scientist of the Year Award, LEGO Papert Fellowship, and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Key skills: AI literacy, Responsible AI, human-computer interaction studies, curriculum design, full-stack web development, hardware development, inclusive education

Archived
Project Research

Impact.AI: K-12 AI Literacy

Today’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are changing how many people play, work, learn, and govern themselves. Due to this rapid …
Archived
Project Research

How to Train Your Robot

How to Train Your Robot is a curriculum for students in 5-8th grade to explore artificial intelligence and ethics. In this course, students…
Article Research

Career Girls Role Models: Randi Williams

Randi Williams talks about her work. Her advice to girls is never to be afraid to make yourself heard; your ideas are essential.
Article Research

Bringing artificial intelligence and MIT to middle school classrooms

MIT researchers and collaborators have developed an open-source curriculum to teach young students about ethics and artificial intelligence.
Post Research

RAISE AI Playground

AI blocks are a suite of drag-and-drop coding blocks that allow students to integrate AI engines into block-based programming projects.
Post Research

Randi Williams named as 2021 Microsoft Research PhD Fellow

Randi Williams from the Personal Robots research group is among ten students who have received the Microsoft PhD Fellowship for 2021.
Post Research

Personal Robots team wins Best Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE Visual Languages and Human-Centered Computing (VL/HCC) conference

Congratulations to Tejal Reddy, Randi Williams, and Professor Cynthia Breazeal!
Article Research

Teaching AI to preschoolers with Randi Williams

In the inaugural episode of the TWiML & AI Podcast’s Black in AI series, PhD student Randi Williams discusses her work with PopBots.
Post Research

Announcing the 2019 LEGO Papert Fellows

The LEGO Papert Fellowships support three graduate students working at the intersection of creativity, play, learning, and new technology.
Publication Research

AI + Ethics Curricula for Middle School Youth: Lessons Learned from Three Project‑Based Curricula

Williams, R., Ali, S., Devasia, N. et al. AI + Ethics Curricula for Middle School Youth: Lessons Learned from Three Project-Based Curricula. Int J Artif Intell Educ (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-022-00298-y
Archived
Project Research

PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
Archived
Thesis Research

Leveraging Social Robots to Aid Preschool Children’s Artificial Intelligence Education

Williams, R. C. (2018). PopBots: Leveraging Social Robots to Aid Preschool Children’s Artificial Intelligence Education.
Publication Research

"Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?" Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interactions

Stefania Druga, Randi Williams, Cynthia Breazeal, and Mitchel Resnick. 2017. "Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?": Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 595-600. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3078072.3084330
Publication Research

Teacher Perspectives on How to Train Your Robot, A Middle School AI and Ethics Curriculum

Williams, R., Kaputsos, S.P., Breazeal, C. Teacher Perspectives on How to Train Your Robot, A Middle School AI and Ethics Curriculum. Proceedings of the 10th Symposium on Education Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI ’21). 2021.
Research
Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
Post Research

Kids, AI devices, and intelligent toys

What do children think about machines that think?