Ran Zhou
PhD Student • HRI, HAPTICS, TANGIBLE INTERACTION
ATLAS Institute
ran.zhou@colorado.edu

Ran Zhou is a creative technologist and researcher passionate about human-robot interaction, haptics and tangible interaction. She is particularly interested in improving the emotional expressiveness of robots and is now devoted to exploring the emotional communication between robots and humans through haptic interaction. She successfully passed her preliminary exam in November 2022, submitting these written responses to her exam prompts. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, with a background in architecture. Her advisor is Daniel Leithinger.

 

Member of the THING Lab  

Publications

Ran Zhou, Zachary Schwemler, Akshay Baweja, Harpreet Sareen, Casey Lee Hunt, and Daniel Leithinger. 2023. "TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Out-of-lab Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch". In: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg, Germany, April 23-28, 2023).

Ran Zhou, Zachary Schwemler, Akshay Baweja, Harpreet Sareen, Casey Lee Hunt, and Daniel Leithinger. 2023. "Demonstrating TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch". In: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg, Germany, April 23-28, 2023). 

S. Sandra Bae, Rishi Vanukuru, Ruhan Yang, Peter Gyory, Ran Zhou, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Danielle Albers Szafir. 2022. Cultivating Visualization Literacy for Children Through Curiosity and Play. In Proceedings of IEEE VIS 2022,  https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2208.05015 (Oct.16-21, 2022—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma).

Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang, and Daniel Leithinger. 2022. EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1330–1344. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533487 .pdf  (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention].

Ran Zhou and Harpreet Sareen. 2020. EmotiTactor: Emotional Expression of Robotic Physical Contact. In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS' 20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 151–156. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.339589

 

In the news

The four projects presented by ATLAS at DIS'22
ATLAS research front and center at DIS’22

June 29, 2022

Researchers from ATLAS Institute's Unstable Design, THING, Living Matter and Superhuman Computing labs presented four papers, including three that received “Honorable Mention” awards, at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22).

An arm with illustrations added of different emotions, symbolizing the emotional effect of touch.
DIS'22: Exploring how designers approach emotional robotic touch

June 22, 2022

Prior psychology findings show humans can communicate distinct emotions solely through touch. In this award-winning work presented at DIS'22, THING Lab researchers hypothesize that similar effects might also be apply to robotic touch.