Biography
Keith Evan Green is the Jean and Douglas McLean Professor of Human Centered Design and professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Green is also Graduate Field member in the PhD Programs of Information Science and Robotics.
Green's Architectural Robotics Lab (ARL) imagines rooms and their furnishings as robots that enable, support, and augment inhabitants.
Practically, the ARL designs "robot-rooms" and studies how these reconfigurable rooms partner with people and what people make of them.
At the interface of design, robotics, and psychology, Architectural Robotics describes meticulous, artfully-designed physical environments and their components that act, think, and grow with their inhabitants. Architectural Robotics supports and augments us as we do things we do: work, play, learn, roam, discover, create, interconnect, heal, age.... The novelty of the lab's research lies in its recognition of the built environment, from furniture and rooms to buildings and metropolis, as a next frontier of human-machine interaction. Green's book, Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes and Biology (MIT Press), defines this emerging field.
My research webpages offers links to my many publications (many downloadable), organized by research project, many of these NSF sponsored.
My teaching focus lies at the interface of Design, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Psychology. I teach and supervise undergraduate and graduate students in all four of these foci. My interdisciplinary teaching is the subject of benchmark papers for ACSA (Architecture), for IEEE ICRA and RAS (robotics), and for ACM interactions (Human-Computer-Interaction). My courses, DEA 2730, 5210, and 6210, focus on human-centered design methods, interaction design studio, and architectural robotics.
Underrepresented faculty and students flourish under my guidance. At University of Auckland (New Zealand) where I was first tenured, 100% of the students I taught were from outside the USA. At Clemson, where I earned tenure for a second time in my career, students I supervised came from Rio de Janeiro, from Cairo, and from within Iran, China and India. I have since mentored more under-represented students in my lab than otherwise.
Irrespective of the origins of my students, I invite all of them to find their own voices in my classroom and lab so that my courses means something for them, and hopefully in the future, for society and for our planet, as these young designers come to design us a promising future.
DEA 2730: Human Centered Design Methods
DEA 6210: Architectural Robotics
DEA 5210: Interaction Design Studio
My webpage offers links to my many publications (many downloadable), organized by research project, many of these NSF sponsored. My publications include:
Green, K. E. Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes and Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Guo, G, Leshed, G, and Green, K. E. 2023. “I normally wouldn't talk with strangers”: Introducing a Socio-Spatial Interface for Fostering Togetherness Between Strangers. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA 20 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581325. HONORABLE MENTION BEST PAPER. [video]
Raquel Cañete,* Yarden Kedar, & Keith E. Green. e-MoBo, a Low-Cost, “Robo-Mediator” Helping Therapists Teach Children How to Express Emotions: Insights from Field Testing. 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Pasadena, CA, 2024. “KAZUO TANIE” BEST PAPER AWARD
Schafer. G, Green, K. E., Walker, I. D., Fullerton, S. K. In Press. Words Become Worlds: The LIT ROOM, a Literacy Support Tool at Room-Scale. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 511-522. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196728. BEST PAPER. [video showing school kids in the LIT ROOM].
Kocher, D. Crandall, C. Yuan, C. and, Green, K. E. GROWBOT: A Robotic System to Help Children Grow PlantsInteraction Design and Children. (IDC ’20 Extended Abstracts), June 21–24, 2020, London, United Kingdom. ACM 978-1-4503-8020-1/20/06. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397617.3402038. BEST DEMO PAPER. [video].
Houayek, H, Green, K. E., Gugerty, L. Walker, I. D. and Witte, J. AWE: An Animated Work Environment for Working with Physical and Digital Tools and Artifacts. In Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing [JPUC], June 2014, Volume 18, Issue 5, pp. 1227–1241. [video clip from IEEE that was on IEEE's homepage as a featured project]
Soleimani, A., Herro, D., Green, K. E., and Walker, I. D.2019. CyberPLAYce – A Tangible, Interactive Learning Tool Fostering Children’s Computational Thinking through Storytelling. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, Elsevier, 20C, pp. 9-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2019.01.002. [video clip]
Threatt, A. L., Merino, J., Green, K. E. & Walker, I. D. An Assistive Robotic Table for Older and Post-Stroke Adults: Results from Participatory Design and Evaluation Activities with Clinical Staff. In Proceedings of CHI 2014: the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,Toronto, Ontario, Canada, pp. 673–682.
[30-second "Video Preview for this paper]; [ART's robotic surface - video]
Yanik, P.M., Merino, J., Threatt, A.L., Manganelli, J., Brooks, J.O., Green, K.E. and Walker, I.D. A Gesture Learning Interface for Simulated Robot Path Shaping with a Human Teacher. IEEE Transactions on Human Machine Systems, 44(1): 41-54, 2014.
Z. Hawks, C. Frazelle, K. E. Green and I. D. Walker. Motion Planning for a Continuum Mobile Lamp: Defining and Navigating the Configuration Space. 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, 2019, pp. 2559-2566, doi: 10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967841.
I am an award-winning, licensed architect (Registered in SC and WA).
I am Senior Member of IEEE.
I am Member of ACM SIGCHI.
As my lab members and I strive to impact the wellbeing and capacity of members of society through my research, my public outreach activities are many and wide-ranging. We invite people of all ages and capabilities to visit our lab and participate in workshops conducted inside our lab and outside our lab in our research test-beds and in other public venues.
In New York State, we are currently collaboarting with the Tompkins County Public Library, the History Center in Tompkins County, the Science Center, and Dryden Central School District.
Interim Chair, Design + Environmental Analysis (DEA) (Spring 2021)
B.A., Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
M.S., Architecture, University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D., Architecture, University of Pennsylvania
M.Arch., University of Illinois at Chicago