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I am a Ph.D. Candidate at Cornell Tech under the supervision of Prof. Wendy Ju. My research investigates how context shapes human-robot interaction. I design systems and tools that account for environmental, social, and situational factors in human-centered studies, aiming to better understand how these factors influence human perceptions and behaviors. By developing methods that help robots interpret and respond to nuanced human cues, my work seeks to improve the design and deployment of interactive robotic systems. My research bridges design, robotics, and human-computer interaction to create technologies that are adaptable, contextually aware, and responsive to real-world complexities.

News

  • New publications at CHI 2025! Stay tuned.
  • [11/15] Gave a talk at the 2nd HRI International Symposium held by Naver Labs Europe.
  • [5/28] Start my summer internship at Toyota Research Institute.
  • [5/14] Presented our work Portobello at CHI and received an Honoranle Mention Award!
  • [3/25] Gave a talk at Nokia Bell Labs Responsible AI Seminar.

Publications

  • Fanjun Bu and Hiroshi Yasuda. 2025. Boosting Visual Fidelity in Driving Simulations through Diffusion Models. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3720255
  • Hannah R. M. Pelikan, Fanjun Bu, and Wendy Ju. 2025. The People Behind the Robots: How Wizards Wrangle Robots in Public Deployments. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26- May 1, 2025, Yokohama,Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713237
  • Matt Franchi, Maria Teresa Parreira, Fanjun Bu, and Wendy Ju. 2025. The Robotability Score: Enabling Harmonious Robot Navigation on Urban Streets. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714009
  • Fanjun Bu, Wendy Ju. “ReStory: VLM-augmentation of Social Human-Robot Interaction Datasets”. In: Palinko, O. et al. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR + AI 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer (not yet published)
  • Fanjun Bu, Wendy Ju. “SSUP-HRI: Social Signaling in Urban Public Human-Robot Interaction dataset”. In: Palinko, O. et al. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR + AI 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer (not yet published)
  • Sharon Yavo-Ayalon, Yuzhen Zhang, Ruixiang Han, Swapna Joshi, Fanjun Bu, Cooper Murr, Lunshi Zhou, and Wendy Ju. 2024. Behind the Scenes of CXR: Designing a Geo-Synchronized Communal eXtended Reality System. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 180–196. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660680 Honorable Mention Award
    • [Paper]
  • Fanjun Bu, Alexandra Bremers, Mark Colley, Wendy Ju. “Field Notes on Deploying Research Robots in Public Spaces”. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages.
    • [Paper]
  • Fanjun Bu and Wendy Ju. 2024. SSUP-HRI: Social Signaling in Urban Public Human-Robot Interaction dataset. In Workshop on Social Signal Modelling, March 11, 2024, Boulder, CO, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages.
    • [arXiv]
  • Fanjun Bu, Stacey Li, David Goedicke, Mark Colley, Gyanendra Sharma, Wendy Ju. “Portobello: Extending Driving Simulation from the Lab to the Road”. In: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2024, pp. 1–13. Honorable Mention Award
    • [Paper] [Video Demo]
  • Barry Brown, Fanjun Bu, Ilan Mandel, Wendy Ju. “Trash in Motion: Emergent interactions with robotic trashcans in a public square”. In: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2024, pp. 1–15.
    • [Paper]
  • Fanjun Bu*, Ilan Mandel*, Wen-Ying Lee, Wendy Ju. “Trash Barrel Robots in the City”. In: Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. HRI ’23. Stockholm, Sweden: Association for Computing Machinery, 2023, pp. 875–877.
    • [Paper][Video]
  • David Goedicke, Alexandra WD Bremers, Sam Lee, Fanjun Bu, Hiroshi Yasuda, Wendy Ju. “XR-OOM: MiXed Reality driving simulation with real cars for research and design”. In: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2022, pp. 1–13.
    • [Paper]
  • Jan Ondras, Abrar Anwar, Tong Wu, Fanjun Bu, Malte Jung, Jorge Jose Ortiz, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee. “Human-robot commensality: Bite timing prediction for robot-assisted feeding in groups”. In: 6th Annual Conference on Robot Learning. 2022.
    • [Paper]
  • Fanjun Bu, Chien-Ming Huang. “Object permanence through audio-visual representations”. In: IEEE Access 9 (2021), pp. 131574–131582.
    • [Paper] [Dataset] [Video]
  • Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Bernardo Fichera, Ilaria Lauzana, Fanjun Bu, Kunpeng Yao, Farshad Khadivar, Aude Billard. “Benchmark for bimanual robotic manipulation of semi-deformable objects”. In: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 5.2 (2020), pp. 2443–2450.
    • [Paper]

Teaching Assistantships

Press

Fanjun (Frank) Bu

Ph.D. Candidate
Computer Science Department
Cornell University, Cornell Tech

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