A CONVERSATION WITH: ANNE FOERST; Do Androids Dream? M.I.T. Working on It

Dr. Anne Foerst, 34, a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of M.I.T.'s God and Computers project, apologized on a recent afternoon that a certain robot named Kismet wouldn't be joining our interview. ''Cynthia Breazeal, who built Kismet, is away in Japan right now and there's no getting her going,'' Dr. Foerst said in her German accent, ''but you'd love her. At the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, engineers are trying to build robots with social skills and humanlike experiences, and so, as an experiment, they've created creatures that they think humans will relate to. Dr. Foerst, a Lutheran minister who supported herself by repairing computers during eight years of higher education in Germany, serves as theological adviser to the scientists building Kismet and the robot's brother, Cog. What exactly do people do here at this laboratory? A. We are trying to build robots that are social and embodied.