Dances with Robots IRL: A Conversation with Catie Cuan

Sydney Skybetter sits down with choreorobotics innovator, Dr. Catie Cuan. They discuss her personal and professional trajectory, and try to answer the question: why dance with a robot?

About Catie:
An engineer, researcher, and artist, Dr. Catie Cuan is a pioneer in the nascent field of ‘choreorobotics’ and works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art.  She is currently a Postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford University. Catie recently defended her PhD in robotics via the Mechanical Engineering department at Stanford, where she also completed a Master’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering. The title of her PhD thesis is “Compelling Robot Behaviors through Supervised Learning and Choreorobotics”, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Stanford University. During her PhD, she led the first multi-robot machine learning project at Everyday Robots (Google X) and Robotics at Google (now a part of Google Deepmind). She has held artistic residencies at the Smithsonian, Everyday Robots (Google X), TED, and ThoughtWorks Arts. Catie is a prolific robot choreographer, having created works with nearly a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. Catie is also a 2023 International Strategy Forum (ISF) fellow at Schmidt Futures and the former co-founder of caali, an embodied media company.

Read the transcript, and find more resources in our archive:
https://www.are.na/choreographicinterfaces/dwr-ep-6-irl-a-conversation-with-choreoroboticist-catie-cuan

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dances-with-robots/id1715669152 

What We Discuss with Catie (Timestamps):
0:00:15: Introduction to Dr. Catie Cuan
0:02:23: Catie's PhD thesis on supervised learning for compelling robot behaviors.
0:03:19: How Catie balanced her dance career with her work in tech.
0:05:35: The skepticism and terror of bringing dance into a STEM environment.
0:06:20: Navigating elite STEM environments as a woman of color.
0:07:41: The history of dance and robotics at Stanford University
0:11:56: Contrasts between STEM and embodied practices.
0:12:44: Catie's relationship with the CRCI community.
0:13:30: The importance of artists in contemplating the meaning of new technologies.
0:14:31: Challenges of creating a complex dance performance with robots.
0:16:24: Lack of templates for realizing installation, performance, and robotics research.
0:19:58: Safety considerations and rules for performing with robots.
0:20:51: Why Boston Dynamics Spot robots and their expressive capabilities.
0:23:32: Contemplating the ethical implications of robot applications.
0:25:27: The future of Choreo Robotics and the importance of imagination.
0:26:00: Dance's role in depicting a universe of creativity and joy.
0:27:35: Choreographers are essential for successful deployment of robots.
0:28:26: Robot dances becoming more prevalent in various contexts.
0:30:04: Dance is essential to culture and human identity.
0:31:20: Dancing with robots is not a novel concept.
0:32:00: Show credits & thanks

The Dances with Robots Team
Host: Sydney Skybetter
Co-Host & Executive Producer: Ariane Michaud
Archivist and Web Designer: Kate Gow
Podcasting Consultant: Megan Hall
Accessibility Consultant: Laurel Lawson
Music: Kamala Sankaram
Audio Production Consultant: Jim Moses
Assistant Editor: Andrew Zukoski
Student Associate: Rishika Kartik

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