Hello, I am Sonya S. Kwak of Ewha Women's University.
I received two requests from TEDxKAIST.
One: the topic of the event was the choices between birth and death.
And I wondered what the choices I had made over the course of my life, and found out that mine were very special relationships.
So my topic for today is 'People I met, The Robots we made".
And Two: there are many foreign students and English lectures are synonymous with KAIST.
So I will be using English when presenting Robots and Korean when introducing the people I have met.
So the people listed here are people I have met and those people who influenced me to make new robots.
The first person is my father.
He never went to the theme park with me but I have 2 memories of him.
In 1988 when I was a 4th grader in elementary school he wrote a letter for me
and in 1991 he took me to see the graduation exhibit of the Industrial Design Department at KAIST.
There was this thing called 'Science Day' and we got to write letters to parents who were scientists.
And he wrote to me that he'll do his best to build better robots to give you and everyone else the benefit of a better life.
Is it because of this I don't know but I am currently enjoying my work with robots albeit from a different perspective.
And the visit to the graduation exhibit in ID KAIST was a huge shock for me.
So much so that I, who simply played in the playground all day, started studying hard to get into KAIST Industrial Design.
I got into KAIST, the school of my dreams, and needed to prepare for my own graduation exhibit.
This is when I met my boyfriend.
The tug of war of love is hard both waiting for contact and maintaining contact but funnily I see him every day now.
The difficulty in keeping contact was where I got the inspiration to try and make a medium that will do the emotional expression in my stead.
So I took two ideas to my then Advisor: a hologram and a robot.
And he commented that since your father is a robot scientist, why don't you do your graduation exhibit on robots?
And it is this single comment that molded me to become a robot designer.
So naturally I went into my Master's program and was having fun with the emotional robot project but on my 2nd year I went on a mental breakdown.
Doing projects and writing dissertations were two very different things.
So I took a year off and found my, what I call 2nd parents: my yoga instructor and my counselor.
This is my yoga instructor and me.
This pose, I did it without wires! Anyways, I thought about becoming a yogi and ending my career as a student.
And as if by destiny, I ran into a KAIST counselor in a sauna near my house.
She looked at me and wondered why I was always with middle aged women doing yoga all day.
So she approached me and helped me find out who I was and even did a MBTI test.
This was why I became interested in the field where humans are the subject of study.
And after coming back from my year off I wrote a dissertation on applying the MBTI test on robots.
From then on I was interested in human-centered and human-robot interaction design, which is the application of socio-biological rules applied between humans on human-robot interaction.
In 2005 I was able to study under Professor Jodi Forlizzi at Carnegie Mellon University.
And in 2007 I met my life partners in robot design.
This person here graduated from Mechanical Engineering at KAIST summa cum laude, and his name can be seen in the lobby in gold, Dr. Eun Ho Kim and Mirae Mulsan's representative Ji Myung Kim.
Ji Myung Kim was my first student at Kun Kook University where I first taught.
I asked her to design a robot that puts words in the phrase 'when something is done, then do something'.
The first something will be the input and the second something will be the output.
Ji Myung Kim came up with the idea when I am hit, I get bruised.
A few years before this happening Dr. Eun Ho Kim presented his research on robot response on not the words, but the tone of the voice in Ro-Man.
So I thought the combination of the two would make a good synergy effect and the result was the language cleaning robot 'Mung'.
In 2009 I met a Robot Company named BeatBots.
This is a company founded by Dr. Marek Michalowski and Dr. Hideki Kozima and they shot music videos with robots called Keepon.
One of the music videos was with Peppertones, a band composed of KAIST graduates.
And my last encounter was a person who I only recently met, my daughter. She was born in 2009.
Isn't she cute?
She liked playing with blocks since she was 18 months old and I observed her and found that these blocks had similar shapes to that of characters in Hangul.
So I thought that it might be possible to play with blocks and learn Korean at the same time which resulted in block-shaped Hangul education robot, Hangul-bot.
I will give a quick demonstration of Hangul-bot.
There is the consonant block and the vowel block. It is a product that stimulates both sides of the brain when playing.
Today I introduced robots that I made with precious people throughout my life. Thank You.