Vivian Chu

Vivian is a 10+ year expert roboticist that specializes in human-robot interaction and has received high tier industry recognition including: recognized by MIT Technology Review on its 35 Innovators Under 35 list, being honored as a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholar, honored as a Stanford EECS Rising Star, awarded Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award at ICRA 2013 and featured on Robohub 25 women in robotics you need to know in 2016 list. In addition to creating Moxi and Poli, Vivian has used her HRI and machine learning expertise on other robotic platforms including PR2, Meka Robot and Kinova Jaco2. She has also worked at Google[X], Honda Research Institute and at IBM Research in Almaden (where she worked on natural language processing and intelligent information integration). Vivian completed her Ph.D. in Robotics at Georgia Tech where she was co-advised by her now co-founder, Dr. Andrea Thomaz (Socially Intelligent Machines Lab), along with Dr. Sonia Chernova (Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning Lab). Vivian received her M.S.E. in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, where she worked in Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Haptics Research Group in the GRASP Lab. She received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009.