I recently completed my Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My research involves designing social behavior for socially interactive systems, particularly humanlike robots. I am also interested in understanding the social, cognitive, and organizational impact of these technologies through experimental and ethnographic studies. In my work, I follow an interdisciplinary process of theoretically and empirically grounded design.
During my Ph.D. training, I worked with Jodi Forlizzi, Jessica Hodgins, Sara Kiesler, and Justine Cassell.
ContactNews & Recent Work
I will be starting a faculty position at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Fall 2009.
I successfuly defended my Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Designing Gaze Behavior for Humanlike Robots," on May 5th.
We won the Best Paper Award at the 2009 HRI Conference for our paper, titled "Footing in Human-Robot Conversations: How Robots Might Shape Participant Roles Using Gaze Cues." [Paper] [Cite]
The New Scientist featured an article on my work on designing nonverbal "leakage" cues for robots on March 22, 2009. [Link] [Paper] [Cite]
My work on designing conversational mechanisms for robots was featured in MIT's Technology Review on March 11, 2009. [Link] [Paper] [Cite]
I gave a colloquium talk at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. [Talk Abstract] [Talk Video]
I will be presenting two papers at the HRI Conference in March:
1. Footing in Human-Robot Conversations: How Robots Might Shape Participant Roles Using Gaze Cues* [Paper] [Cite]
2. Nonverbal Leakage in Robots: Communication of Intentions through Seemingly Unintentional Behavior** [Paper] [Cite]
* Co-authored w/ T. Shiwa, T. Kanda, H. Ishiguro, & N. Hagita
** Co-authored w/ F. Yamaoka, T. Kanda, H. Ishiguro, & N. Hagita
I gave an invited talk titled "The Design of Social Behavior for Machines" at the 3rd NSF-CISE-CPATH Workshop on Social Robots held in Schenectady, NY in November'09 and organized by the Social Robotics Consortium.
I am co-organizing a AAAI Symposium titled "Experimental Design for Real-World Systems" that will be held at Stanford in March'09 and a workshop titled "Social Responsibility in HRI: Conducting our Research, Changing the World" at the 2009 Human-Robot Interaction Conference that will be held in San Diego in March'09.
I completed a study at ATR, in collaboration with Fumitaka Yamaoka, Takayuki Kanda, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, of whether people can read nonverbal leakages (unintentional, non- strategic, non- semantic nonverbal behaviors) in two robots, Geminoid and Robovie and make attributions of intentionality to the robots (evidenced by increase in task performance). We found that people the leakage cue affected participants performance only with Geminoid and not with Robovie, from which we infer that they made stronger attributions of intentionality to Geminoid than they did to Robovie. We also found that participants were less likely to report identifying the gaze cue with Geminoid than with Robovie. Also, the gaze cue only affected the performance of pet owners and not others. [Paper - To appear]
I gave an invited talk at Osaka University titled "The Design of Gaze Behavior for Humanoid Robots".
I will be visiting Hiroshi Ishiguro's lab at ATR, Japan to conduct an experiment with Geminoid until the end of September 2008.
I proposed my dissertation titled "The Design of Gaze Behavior for Social Robots". [Flyer] [Document]
I participated in the CHI 2008 Doctoral Consortium. [Abstract]
Our paper titled "Robots in Organizations: Workflow, Social, Political, and Environmental Factors in Human-Robot Interaction" was awarded the Best Paper Award at HRI 2008. [Paper]
