David Harris Smith

About

David Harris Smith is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of artificial intelligence, social robotics, and human-robot interaction. He is best known as the co-creator of hitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot that captured global imagination before its tragic destruction in Philadelphia in 2015. This landmark project, detailed in his most-cited paper (40 citations), explored public trust, social media engagement, and the emotional bonds humans form with machines. Smith’s work on hitchBOT generated unprecedented data on how people react when a robot “dies,” as shown in his 2019 study analyzing Twitter sentiment (23 citations). He has since extended his research to healthcare, demonstrating how AI-enhanced social robots can improve children’s medical experiences (24 citations), and to the philosophical frontiers of artificial consciousness, co-authoring a cross-disciplinary dialogue on synthetic models of consciousness (17 citations). With over 128 total citations across his top papers, Smith’s contributions bridge engineering, ethics, and sociology, challenging us to reconsider what it means to create, trust, and mourn autonomous machines.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   The Death and Lives of hitchBOT: The Design and Implementation of a Hitchhiking Robot

   40 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children’s Healthcare Experiences

   24 citations · 2020
3. 3
   How do we feel when a robot dies? Emotions expressed on Twitter before and after hitch

   23 citations · 2019
4. 4
   Why Build a Robot With Artificial Consciousness? How to Begin? A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on the Design and Implementation of a Synthetic Model of Consciousness

   17 citations · 2021
5. 5
   Social Media in Human–Robot Interaction

   14 citations · 2019
6. 6
   hitchBOT: The Risks and Rewards of a Hitchhiking Robot

   10 citations · 2017

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links