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 the founder and CEO of Zenie, a consumer AI company, backed by Gradient Ventures and HF0. Catie holds a PhD and Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a Postdoc leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center.  

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