Dan Lee, GRASP Professor, invited to appear on Colbert Report “Keep Fear Alive”

October 29th, 2010

By: Elena Gooray | Posted: 27 October 2010

This week, a Penn professor helped Stephen Colbert in his quest to “keep fear alive.”

In preparation for the political satirist’s “Keep Fear Alive” march scheduled for Saturday, School of Engineering and Applied Science professor Daniel Lee traveled to Colbert’s New York studio on Wednesday to film a segment in which Colbert confronts his television alter ego’s greatest fears — which include robots.

The segment is tentatively scheduled to air tonight.

Lee — an associate professor in the department of Electrical and Systems Engineering — leads the UPennalizers, the Penn robotics team which competes annually in RoboCup, an international competition in which groups build and program robots to play soccer.

Lee demonstrated the soccer-playing abilities of the team’s two robots for Colbert, who also confronted his professed fear of “bears and Muslims” during the segment, according to Steve McGill, a first-year graduate student in Electrical and Systems Engineering.

McGill, who went to New York with another Penn student to help Lee set up the robots, said Colbert filmed about three hours of material for the segment, though it is not yet clear what will make the final cut………

Daily Pennsylvanian Article

Penn Current Article

*The segement aired at 11:30pm on Thursday, October 28th on Comedy Central