Dr. Guy Hoffman is Assistant Professor and the Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that he was Assistant Professor at IDC Herzliya and co-director of the IDC Media Innovation Lab. Hoffman holds a Ph.D. from MIT in the field of human-robot interaction. He heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC2) group, studying the algorithms, interaction schema, and designs enabling close interactions between people and personal robots in the workplace and at home. Among others, Hoffman developed the world’s first human-robot joint theatre performance, and the first real-time improvising human-robot Jazz duet. His research papers won several top academic awards, including Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2015. In both 2010 and 2012, he was selected as one of Israel’s most promising researchers under forty. His TEDx talk is one of the most viewed online talks on robotics, watched more than 2.9 million times. Hoffman received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University as part of the Adi Lautman interdisciplinary excellence scholarship program.

Dr. Guy Hoffman started talking about the HRC2 Lab mission. It is to understand the complex interplay between human behaviours, attitudes, and needs of personal robotic technologies in order to design robots that best support human values. Always we think about “will robots take my job” and it is a technological economic question like technological means can robots do a certain job. But the real prism we should all take to answering this question should be a question of values and we need to think about the humans involved in this workplace. Discussion also included in detail on-Where are robots Going? Where are robots Going like according to academic research and robotics? There are three areas where people are doing research that will place robots like homes, public places and work.