A conversation with Keith Green, Cornell DEA/MAE, and Chajoong Kim, Cornell Visiting Professor
10/8/2019
Location: Upson 106 Conference Room Next to the Lounge
Time: 3:00p.m.
Abstract: Robots are engineered products designed to perform a task. In industrial robot deployments, such as factory and warehouse settings, the robot’s environment is often engineered to simplify the robot’s task. As robots begin to be deployed in our daily lives around untrained human users, the question becomes: who must adapt to whom? In this panel, we discuss the following questions:
Anthropomorphism and Bio-inspiration: Shouldn’t robots have their own look and behavior, or must they reference familiar living things?
If robots can’t (yet) do all that we’d like them to do in a given physical environment (e.g. a hospital, a school, a workplace), might we change the physical environment to better fit the (current and near future) capacities of robots, or should we focus our efforts on advancing the robot to fit the human environments we already have?
Bio: Keith Evan Green is professor of design (DEA) and mechanical engineering (MAE) at Cornell University. He addresses problems and opportunities of an increasingly digital society by developing and evaluating interactive and adaptive physical environments and, more broadly, novel robotic manipulators. For Green, the built environment—furniture to metropolis—is a next frontier at the interface of robotics, design, and psychology.
Bio: Chajoong (“CJ”) Kim is associate professor at the Graduate School of Creative Design Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea. Dr. Kim investigates how affective experiences in human-product interactions influence user well-being. During this sabbatical year at Cornell, Dr. Kim is studying “the functions of experiencing diverse positive emotions in de-accelerating hedonic adaptation and promoting subjective well-being in the context of consumer product use.”