Catie Cuan

Taking the train to Lincoln Center and dancing at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and traveling all over the United States to be in various shows.

I did The King and I at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

I did Cinderella at the Gateway Theater.

I had my own dance company, actually, and we did something between like six to ten shows a year.

Yeah, it was very scary for our family.

He had a stroke.

And my dad, you know, English is his third language.

He was in his mid-60s at the time.

So he had a heart monitor, you know, the thing that blips and bloops on the screen.

And he also had quite a few issues with his lungs, and so there was something that was helping to track his breathing.

You know, seeing my dad so small and surrounded by all of these machines, I thought these things are meant to help assist him and empower him, but he feels very alienated and afraid of them.

And that struck me as such the wrong relationship between humans and our technologies.

And it started to open the door to so many questions about how we could live with our technologies in a way that we weren't living with them.

So even though there were lots of valid assertions that grad school was going to be very hard for me, I kind of did it anyway.

And I did my master's, my PhD, and then my postdoc all at Stanford in mechanical engineering and computer science.

What's it going to be like when not only you have autonomous vehicles on the road, but then you have robots?

autonomous robots who are showing up to deliver your burrito, and you have an autonomous robot that might fly in to drop off a package, and then you go to your doctor's office and there's an autonomous robot that takes your temperature.

Like, this is a completely different way of living and working.

I think we're about to undergo one of the most consequential shifts to our built environment in a long time.

So the question for me is how can we then build robots that make people feel empowered, inspired, legible and clear that they feel safe around and know how to control?