Guy Hoffman,
IDC Herzliya

Keynote: Designing the Robotic User Experience: Behavior and Appearance

Time: TBA

Abstract

Soon robots are expected to enter our homes, offices, schools, nursing facilities, operating rooms, construction sites, and repair shops. How do we go about designing for machines that have the most powerful communicative interface: a physical body? Designing interactive robots needs to balance both appearance and behavioral requirements. A robot’s appearance evokes interaction affordances and triggers emotional responses; its behavior communicates internal states, and can support action coordination and joint planning. In this talk I will present the design approach we have been using in the past decade to develop several non-humanoid robotic systems. The underlying principles of both appearance and behavioral design are movement, timing, and embodiment, acknowledging that human perception is highly sensitive to spatial cues, physical movement, and visual affordances.

Bio

Dr. Guy Hoffman is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at IDC Herzliya, and co-director of the IDC Media Innovation Lab. Before, he was a research fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at MIT. Hoffman holds a Ph.D from MIT in the field of human-robot interaction, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. He also studied animation at Parsons School of Design in NYC.Hoffman heads the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) group, focusing on human-robot collaboration and companionship, embodied cognition for robots, anticipation and timing in HRI and multi-agent MDPs, nonverbal communication in HRI, entertainment, theater, and musical performance robotics, and non-humanoid robot design. Among others, Hoffman developed the world’s first human-robot joint theater performance, as well as the first real-time improvising human-robot Jazz duet. Hoffman designed several robots, including a robotic desk lamp, “AUR”, which won the IEEE International Robot Design Competition. His research papers won several top academic awards, including Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2015. He was software and animation lead on the World Expo Digital Water Pavilion, one of TIME magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year”, and was commissioned for a title-page illustration of the New York Times “Week in Review”. Hoffman’s work has been exhibited world-wide and covered in the international press, including CNN, the BBC, The New York Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Haaretz, Science, the New Scientist, PBS, NPR, and Comedy Central. In both 2010 and 2012, he was selected as one of Israel’s most promising researchers under forty. His TEDx talk is one of the most viewed online talks on robotics, and was viewed more than 2.5 million times.