Currently a professor at Milab at IDC Herzliya
Guy Hoffman is a postdoctoral associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Music Technology. Prior he was a research fellow at the Media Innovation Lab at IDC Herzliya, Israel, and a postdoctoral associate at MIT; he holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. His academic background also includes work in animation, psychology, new media, and film studies. Hoffman has held several senior positions in the Israeli software industry.
Hoffman’s main research interest is concerned with models and mechanisms that enable robots to act jointly with humans, especially through repetitive practice. Recent work includes anticipatory models for MDPs, a computational framework for perceptual priming, and an anticipatory perceptual simulation system enabling robots to perform more fluently and more efficiently with humans. Other research includes nonverbal behavior in human-robot teamwork, and the application of theater acting techniques to artificial intelligence.
In 2007, Hoffman staged a pioneering human-robot theater performance “the Confessor”, and that same year his robotic desk lamp AUR won the 2007 IEEE International Robot Design Competition. Between 1997 and 2004 he wrote a weekly technology column for Israel’s leading national daily Haaretz. Hoffman has written and lectured widely on robot teamwork and robot design, and his design and curatorial work in animation, data visualization, architecture, theater, and new media art has been internationally published and exhibited.
Selected publications:
G. Hoffman and R. Kubat.
A Hybrid Control System for Puppeteering a Live Robotic Stage Actor,
Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RoMan’08), August 2008.
G. Hoffman and C. Breazeal.
Anticipatory Perceptual Simulation for Human-Robot Joint Practice: Theory and Application Study,
Proceedings of the 23rd AAAI Confererence for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’08), July 2008.
G. Hoffman and C. Breazeal.
Cost-Based Anticipatory Action Selection for Human-Robot Fluency,
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 23, No. 5, 2007.
G. Hoffman.
Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence,
Abstract, 50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence, July 2006.
G. Hoffman and C. Breazeal.
Robotic Partners’ Bodies and Minds: An Embodied Approach to Fluid Human-Robot Collaboration,
Fifth International Workshop on Cognitive Robotics, July 2006.
G. Hoffman and C. Breazeal.
Collaboration in Human-Robot Teams,
1st AIAA Intelligent Systems Conference, Chicago, IL, September 2004.
A. Brooks, J. Gray, G. Hoffman, A. Lockerd, H. Lee and C. Breazeal.
Robot’s Play: Interactive Games with Sociable Machines,
Computers in Entertainment, Vol. 2, No. 3 , July 2004.