I am a PhD graduate from Cornell University, where I developed Blossom, an open-source social robot platform. Blossom was designed for accessibility: its hardware and software is open-source, and several researchers have created their own versions of Blossom.
Blossom is a platform for researching generative behaviors through deep neural networks. Through encoder-decoder networks, Blossom 'remixes' user-made movements into autonomously generated behaviors.
Blossom also acts as a telepresence platform, controlled via a smartphone's mobile browser and the remote user's physical movement.
My presentation at the RoboPhilosophy conference sums up the Blossom project, which is still ongoing.
Prior to Cornell, I studied mechanical engineering and programming at NC State. My graduation cap was kinda famous. My past work experiences include NASA MSFC, Honda Research Institute Japan, and Facebook AI Research.
Outside of work, I like to build stuff,
and play music.
Publications (Google Scholar)
Journals
Michael Suguitan, Nick DePalma, Jessica Hodgins, and Guy Hoffman. Face2Gesture: Translating Facial Expressions Into Robot Movements Through Shared Latent Space Neural Networks. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI) Special Issue on AI (in revision), 2023.
Conferences
Michael Suguitan. At Least, Be Human: Humanizing the Robot as a Medium for Communication. In RoboPhilosophy, 2022.
Extended Abstracts
Miscellaneous
Michael Suguitan. Robots as Humanizing Post-Digital Media. In International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) Metaphors for HRI Workshop Submissions, 2020.
Michael Suguitan and Guy Hoffman. A Portrait of the Robot as a Communicative Medium: Using the DIY Blossom Robot for Accessible Embodied Telepresence. In International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) Student Design Competition (Finalist), 2021.