Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski is an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Creative Computing with a courtesy appointment in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. Her work supports design and implementation processes in human-computer and human-robot interaction. She emphasizes co-design and participatory design approaches, particularly focusing on designing and implementing robots and AI in industrial, manufacturing, and home contexts, among others. She also focuses on designing policies around new technologies in these ecosystems. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) and in the MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group. Anastasia received her PhD in media arts and sciences from MIT, focused on equitable technology design, and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan, focused on engineering design processes and idea generation.
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is one of the biggest unlocks left in industrial automation to enable stronger safety, but most HRI research happens on university campuses that produces data that rarely survives contact with a live production floor. Running studies inside a working manufacturing site is logistically hard enough that most academia–industry partnerships never get past the first meeting. Faraz Yousuf (Eli Lilly) and Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski (Purdue) share what they learned running HRI field studies with manufacturing and warehouse operators around live AGVs, some early findings of people's perception of robots on the manufacturing floor and the playbook they built to make the partnership repeatable.
