Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech, Dr. Wendy Ju presented the 2025 Anne Sophie Laumont Lecture on her work specializing in human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces. Ju’s current research, which studies everyday urban interaction between robots and people, was the focus of her presentation.

Ju joined Cornell Tech in 2017, and felt very fortunate to conduct her research in the heart of the city. “I was excited to do more field studies in a bigger sandbox, and there’s really no better sandbox for understanding these interactions than New York City. Literally, people from the whole world come here for their case studies, to look at urban planning and architecture,” she said.

Ju shared several projects with the Upper School audience, one focused on communal extended reality, where research participants wore virtual reality headsets and sat on a simulated bus. Ju shared a clip of the participants “riding” on a bus route through a “digital twin” of New York City riverfront neighborhoods. The virtual city included all of the real stop signs, buildings, trash cans, and other key objects and essential buildings, using Google Maps and NYC Department of City Planning as research. The goal of this project was to observe how we might react to flood and climate change scenarios if we needed to navigate through them in an automobile.

The second project she shared studied how we interact with robots that interact with us. Ju’s team assembled trash-collecting robots, outfitted with cameras and operated by off-site researchers, in busy Astor Place in downtown New York City, where tables, chairs, and a cafe are located. Through video, researchers learned that individuals held many assumptions about the robots: that the robots “eat” trash, that the robots needed help getting around. Some observations even included participants showing kindness to the trash cans—moving them if they became stuck—while others became weary or nervous around them. 

“A lot of people wanted to know, whose robot is it?” Ju shared. “What they didn’t ask was, how does it work? I want to tell people how it’s made—how we recycled hoverboards, etc. But what they care about is who this robot is representing.”

Insightful questions from Upper School students allowed Ju to discuss her process of iteration, and her hope that the research she leads will make way for humane and moral robot technology. One student asked, “How do you reckon with a sense of growing resentment of AI technology in our society?”

Ju acknowledged and agreed with the sentiment. “I also have a deep skepticism about technology,” she said. “I live in the world, I have screens that are incredibly addictive…the thing I’m trying to do is make technology more humane. Less of ‘this is cool, and we can get people to spend a lot of money on it,’ and more of, ‘how can something be useful?’ I have optimism.”