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. Currently, I am a postdoc researching computer vision and deep reinforcement learning at the ABB Research Center in Raleigh.
Outside of work, I like to build stuff,
and play music.
僕は僕だ (I am me) - Digital montage (Photoshop, OpenCV, MoviePy)
Publications (Google Scholar)
Journals
Conferences
Michael Suguitan, Nick DePalma, Jessica Hodgins, and Guy Hoffman. Face2Gesture: Translating Facial Expressions Into Robot Movements Through Shared Latent Space Neural Networks. In preparation, 2022.
Michael Suguitan. At Least, Be Human: Humanizing the Robot as a Medium for Communication. In RoboPhilosophy (in revision), 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.