Bruce Blumberg

Bruce Blumberg is a Principal UX Engineer at Universal Robots, the world’s leading collaborative robot manufacturer. Previously, he was Research Fellow at Rethink Robotics, and held management positions at the MIT Media Lab, Blue Fang Games, Apple Computer and NeXT Computer. At Universal and Rethink, Bruce helped usher in the new age of collaborative robots. Rather than being caged for safety and programmed for a single purpose, collaborative robots are designed to be safe, small and economical and to work side by side with people. At Blue Fang, Bruce led the development of expressive, intelligent and engrossing animal characters, raising the bar for digital entertainment. Bruce was an associate professor at The MIT Media Lab and served as director of the Synthetic Characters Group leading groundbreaking research on behavior, learning and motor control for autonomous animated characters. Bruce earned an MS in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a PhD in media arts and sciences from the MIT Media Lab.