Hi friends,
Last night was my first time hosting an event with New York Robotics, and what a way to start. Close to 400 people packed Zero Space, standing room only, to celebrate the meeting of creativity and engineering. It felt like the early days of the PC, when gunslingers were building wild, brilliant things nobody had a name for yet. Investors, partners, founders, and creators all felt it. Thank you to Zero Space for hosting, and to everyone who came out.
Now we're carrying that energy straight into our next event, and I'm really excited about this one.
🤖 AI with Presence: The Choreography of Shared Space Presented by Capgemini's Applied Innovation Exchange and frog, in partnership with New York Robotics
📅 Tuesday, October 13, 2026 🕕 6:00 – 8:00 PM (doors open at 5:30 PM) 📍 New York, NY (exact location shared after registration) 👉 Request your spot on Luma
Robots are leaving the lab and the factory floor. They're showing up on city streets, in stores, hotels, hospitals, and airports, right alongside us. And that changes everything about how they need to be designed.
Human spaces run on subtle signals: mood, personality, body language, the unspoken cues that tell us how to share a sidewalk or wait in a line. A robot that ignores those cues feels intrusive. One that reads them well feels natural, even helpful. So what are the new rules of coexistence? How do we design machines that people are actually comfortable being around?
That's exactly what this panel will tackle, and the lineup brings together design, engineering, and research:
Inna Lobel, Head of frog Physical Leads physical product design at frog across North America, with a growing focus on robotics and physical AI. Formerly on Apple's product design team, MIT Media Lab graduate, patent holder, and NYU instructor in human-centered design.
Josh Merel, Director of Applied Science and Co-Founder, Fauna Robotics (an Amazon company) Builds safe, adaptive robots designed to fit into everyday environments. Previously a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and a research leader at Meta's CTRL-Labs, with a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Columbia.
Wendy Ju, Professor of Information Science and Design Tech, Cornell Tech One of the leading voices in human-robot interaction, with more than 100 publications on making machines safer, more predictable, and more socially aware. Inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2025.
The evening: 5:30 PM: Doors open, welcome drinks 6:00 PM: Programming begins 6:30 PM: Panel and Q&A 7:15 PM: Networking 8:00 PM: Close
Whether you're building robots, designing experiences, investing in physical AI, or just curious about how we'll live alongside intelligent machines, this is a room you want to be in.
Seating is limited and registration requires host approval, so request your spot early. Please bring a photo ID to enter the building.
Register now: luma.com/ykvv7qng
See you on the 13th,
Mike Rizkalla New York Robotics