Lecture by Wendy Ju: Interaction Intelligence for Everyday Robots


Nottingham School of Art and Design, Bonington BON224 
March 20, 2024, 2-3.30PM


Nottingham School of Art and Design and the Design Research Centre are proud to welcome Associate Professor Wendy Ju from the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion to give the next Research Lecture. 

Dr. Ju came to Cornell Tech from the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, where she was Executive Director of Interaction Design Research, and from the California College of the Arts, where she was an Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the Design MFA program. Her work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Dr. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

In her lecture, she will talk about how in everyday human interaction, people monitor each other to see if others understand their meaning, and they stop and self-correct if they recognize that they have made an error. As intelligent systems such as autonomous cars or delivery robots increasingly permeate our lives, it becomes important to think about these machines might recognize and recover from errors in the way that people expect. The design of interaction intelligence relies on an understanding of how people normally behave, and how they behave when something is out of the norm. I present recent work from my research group which considers how interaction intelligence can be as important as task intelligence for robots working around people.

The lecture will be given "remotely in person" at the Bonington building with snacks provided, as well as on Teams.