Wendy Ju

Wendy Ju is a professor who studies how people respond to robots and automated vehicles. She earned degrees at Stanford and MIT, taught design, and led interaction design research before joining Cornell Tech in 2018. Her ghostdriver and trash robot studies examine how people respond to systems that appear autonomous. She spent June 2024 to December 2024 as a scholar in residence at Sweden’s Digital Futures centre and joined the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2025. In July 2026, her team tested whether vision-language models could read social cues, and she is a professor across Cornell and the Technion.

Now at: Cornell University and Technion
Badges: Boomerang

Timeline

1997–2017

Stanford degrees and design research

She graduates in mechanical engineering from Stanford in 1997 and earns an M.S. in media arts and sciences at MIT in 2001, advised by Michael Hawley. At Stanford, she completes a mechanical engineering Ph.D. under Larry Leifer in 2008, then works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department and Center for Design Research from 2009 to 2013 and becomes its executive director for interaction design research from 2013 to 2017. From 2008 to 2017, she holds assistant and associate professorships in design at the California College of the Arts; her book The Design of Implicit Interactions, based on her dissertation, appears in 2015.
2018–2020

Assistant professor at Cornell Tech

She joins Cornell Tech as an assistant professor in 2018 and becomes an associate professor in 2020.
2020

Ghostdriver studies

Her team studies hidden-driver cars, placing the driver beneath a seat-like hood so the vehicle appears driverless. A 2020 paper names her senior author and examines pedestrians in the Netherlands, the United States, and Mexico; it earns an honorable mention at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Pedestrians look at the car’s front bumper and front wheel, seeking eye contact with the driver only if something seems unusual.
2022–2023

Trash robots in New York

In 2022, her team deploys two trash barrel robots on Astor Place in Manhattan, one for landfill waste and one for recycling. In March 2023, its video “Trash Barrel Robots in the City” is presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction; a second deployment follows at Albee Square in Brooklyn in July 2023. People operate the robots behind the scenes while the public thinks they act autonomously, a Wizard of Oz experiment.
June 2024–December 2024

Scholar in residence in Sweden

From June 2024 to December 2024, she is a scholar in residence at Digital Futures. She works with researchers at KTH, Stockholm University, and Linkoping University to study how people interact with robots and autonomous vehicles in public spaces.
2025

ACM SIGCHI Academy

She joins the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2025, an honorary group of leaders who have shaped the field. Her methods for studying interactions with automated vehicles are replicated by the University of California San Diego, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the University of Sussex, and adopted by Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Renault, Volkswagen, and Volvo.
July 2026

Testing vision-language models

A Cornell Tech study tests whether vision-language models can help robots interpret social cues by predicting the outcomes of scenes in short videos. The best models outperform average human predictions when they analyze video. They fail to anticipate outcomes from bystanders’ facial expressions alone.
As of October 2026

Professor at Cornell and Technion

She is a professor of information science and design tech at Cornell Tech, Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. She adds an affiliation with Cornell’s new Design Tech department in 2022. In 2023, she becomes an associate professor in the Technion’s Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning.

Career

Since 2023TechnionAssociate professor
Since 2018Cornell UniversityAssistant professor, Associate professor
2024KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyScholar in residence
2009–2017Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral researcher, Executive director for interaction design research
2008–2017California College of the ArtsAssistant and associate professor