RESEARCH

I am a PhD graduate from Cornell University, where I developed Blossom, an open-source social robot platform. Blossom was designed as a critique of stereotypical mass-manufactured white-and-black LED-illuminated commercial robots. I — and the many students and collaborators whom I had the pleasure of working with — developed Blossom as a robot construction kit, AI research platform, and telepresence device; my presentation at the RoboPhilosophy conference sums up the Blossom project, which is continued by other researchers.

My papers are available here and on my Google Scholar. My CV is available here.

Thesis

Michael Suguitan. At Least, Be Human: Humanizing the Robot as a Medium for Communication. PhD Thesis.

Journal Papers

Michael Suguitan and Guy Hoffman. Blossom: A Handcrafted Open-Source Robot. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 2019.

Michael Suguitan and Guy Hoffman. What Is It Like to Be a Bot? Variable Perspective Embodied Telepresence for Crowdsourcing Robot Movements. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2022.

Face-to-movement translation network Face-to-gesture translation neural network.

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.

Conference Papers

Movement affective modification neural network. Movement modification neural network, mapped to the affective valence-arousal circumplex model of emotions.

Michael Suguitan, Randy Gomez, and Guy Hoffman. MoveAE: Modifying Affective Robot Movements Using Classifying Variational Autoencoders. In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2020.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, Maria Luce Lupetti, Michal Luria, Diana Löffler, Mafalda Gamboa, Lea Albaugh, Waki Kamino, Anastasia K Ostrowski, David Puljiz, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Marcus Scheunemann, Michael Suguitan, Dan Lockton. Collection of Metaphors for Human-Robot Interaction. In Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 2021.

Michael Suguitan. At Least, Be Human: Humanizing the Robot as a Medium for Communication. In RoboPhilosophy, 2022.

Extended Abstracts

Human-robot movement translation network. Human-to-robot movement translation CycleGAN network.

Michael Suguitan, Mason Bretan, and Guy Hoffman. Affective Robot Movement Generation Using CycleGANs. In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Late Breaking Reports (Third Place Prize), 2019.

Telepresence setup for Blossom Evaluation setup for telepresence study.

Michael Suguitan and Guy Hoffman. You Are (Not) The Robot: Variable Perspective Motion Control of a Social Telepresence Robot. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) Extended Abstracts, 2021.

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.