Vivian Chu

Vivian Chu (born c. 1987) is an American roboticist and entrepreneur, specializing in the field of human-robot interaction. She is Chief Technology Officer at Diligent Robotics, a company she co-founded in 2017 for creating autonomous, mobile, socially intelligent robots.

Early life and education Chu was born in San Jose, California. Growing up, she lived with her parents, who were both software engineers, and her grandparents.

She received her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. During her time at Berkeley, she worked as a research assistant in the lab of Dennis K. Lieu, where she worked on integrated flywheels in triple hybrid drive trains. Upon graduation, she worked for IBM Almaden Research, an innovation lab for disruptive technology, where her research centered on natural language processing and intelligent information integration. She focused on haptic technology to enable robots to both interact with their environment and understand the abstract terms that humans would use to describe the feeling of that interaction. For example, a human may say a carpet is fuzzy, but Chu's algorithms would enable a robot to sense the rug, perform a computation, and also associate that “feeling” with the adjective or descriptor of fuzzy.

After completing her Master's in 2013, Chu had a summer internship at Honda Research Institute and continued graduate training at Georgia Tech. Her work focused on building algorithms that enable robots to reason about action effects and interact with their environments in an adaptable way. She figured that she could approach robot learning in this way as well, giving robots the basic building blocks of cognition so that they could play with objects in the environment and learn the appropriate ways to interact with them. Chu and Thomaz filed a patent in 2017 for this technology, which is also when she completed her PhD. She then began working alongside Andrea Thomaz to create a company to build socially intelligent robots that can assist people with chores at work and home. In 2017, they co-founded Diligent Robotics. She leads a diverse team of roboticists who build robots that feature autonomous mobile manipulation, social intelligence, and human-guided learning abilities, inspired by Chu's graduate discoveries. a one-arm robot that was able to pre-fetch supply kits to allow nursing staff to spend more time with patients. Poli was piloted at Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas in Austin. is a refurbished and updated version of Poli. It possesses more human-like features including a face that can visually communicate social cues and a head and torso. It has won accolades including being named as Time's 100 Best Inventions (2019), World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer (2021), and Newsweek America's Greatest Disruptors (2021).

Awards and honors

2013 Best paper in cognitive robotics IEEE International Conference on Robotics 2016 Paper on Human-Guided Robot Self-Exploration nominated for Best Technical Advance in Human-Robot Interaction 2019 MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 2022 Fast Company Queer 50 2022 Fortune Magazine 40 under 40

Depiction in media

2020: The Future of Science is Female by Zara Stone

Appearances

In November 2020, Chu keynoted at ROS World on "Accelerating Innovation with ROS: Lessons in Healthcare" In October 2022, Chu keynoted at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Kyoto on “Launching Socially-Aware Mobile Manipulation Robots in Hospitals.” In July 2023, Chu presented at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Utah on "Robotic Revolution."

Select publications

Bin Liu, Laura Chiticariu, Vivian Chu, H. V. Jagadish, and Frederick R. Reiss, "Refining Information Extraction Rules Using Data Provenance", IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 2010.