About the IAPP

An entrepreneur, engineer, and artist, 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 the founder and CEO of Zenie, a consumer AI company, backed by Gradient Ventures and HF0. Cuan holds a doctorate and a Master of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a postdoctoral researcher leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center. 

The title of her doctoral 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 doctoral work, 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, and ThoughtWorks Arts. 

Cuan is a prolific and award-winning robot choreographer, having created works with nearly a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. Cuan is also an International Strategy Forum (ISF) fellow at Schmidt Futures and the former co-founder of caali, an embodied media company.