2025 Honorary Degree Recipient and Keynote Speaker
Kate Darling
Dr. Kate Darling is a leading expert in the evolving role of robotics in everyday life, serving as a research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab and a lead for ethics & society at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Her groundbreaking studies on social robotics and human-robot interaction explore the emotional bonds people form with lifelike machines. Her work is shaping and guiding technology design and public policy decisions on the evolving relationships between humans and robots, tackling the pressing questions engineers, lawmakers, and society must address in the coming years.
With a background in law, economics, and intellectual property, Darling has examined the economic incentives behind copyright and patent systems, serving as an intellectual property policy advisor to the MIT Media Lab and helping establish the MIT-BU Technology Law Clinic. She is a former fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Yale Information Society Project and serves as senior co-chair for We Robot, the leading conference on robotics law and policy.
A prominent voice in her field, Darling has been featured in The New Yorker, BBC, WIRED, The Atlantic, and more. She writes a monthly column for BBC Science Focus and has contributed to Robohub and IEEE Spectrum. Her book The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots examines how human-animal relationships can inform our understanding of robots. Darling holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich and an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College and has received the American Bar Association’s Mark T. Banner Award for Intellectual Property.