Dr. Catie Cuan

An entrepreneur, engineer, 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 building a new AI company called ART Lab (AI Robot Technology). She previously founded and was the CEO of Zenie, the AI journal that writes back to you, backed by Gradient Ventures and HF0. Catie holds a PhD and Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she was also a Postdoc leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center. She is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford in computer science.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, the Exploratorium, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Everyday Robots (Google X), TED, the RAD Lab, and ThoughtWorks Arts. Catie is a prolific and award-winning robot choreographer, having created works with over a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. Catie is also an Obama Leader USA and an International Strategy Forum (ISF) fellow at Schmidt Futures. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, WIRED, Engadget, Forbes, and on the PBS NewsHour, among other outlets.Catie is a sought-after public speaker, lecturing on topics like AI, robotics, art, and human interaction. She has spoken on the mainstage at TED, SXSW, the WIRED 30th Anniversary, and at companies like Pinterest, Apple, Nike, and Google X. Catie has lectured at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the University of Arizona, and Brown University.