Publications

Explore our research contributions and published works

  • Dreaming Up Smart Home Futures: A Story Completion Study

    Virtual assistants, vacuum robots, security systems, and other smart home technologies are rapidly advancing, evolving, and gaining popularity. This raises questions of how people envision future interactions with smart home systems and how they imagine the future roles of such technologies in society. We deployed an online study that collected fictional short stories from 60 participants about smart home interactions. We identified themes regarding the roles of smart home technologies, social interactions with AI, and concerns about data privacy in the context of the home. We describe our method, discuss insights from the stories that explicitly reflect possible futures and implicitly reflect the present, and make design recommendations based on our findings.

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Elizabeth J Carter, Lynn Kirabo, Terrence Fong, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi
    Journal:
    2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2023
    DOI:
    10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309562
    View Paper

  • Contrasting Affiliation and Reference Cues for Conversational Agents in Smart Environments

    This paper investigates how conversational agents that are embedded in smart environments should present themselves socially. In an online study, we simulate a future space habitat in which "astronauts" (participants) interact with one or more agents to complete several tasks related to science, maintenance, and inventory. We examine effects of agent affiliation (affiliation with a user, affiliation with a domain, or affiliation with all users and all domains) and narrative perspective (first-vs. third-person references to parts of the environment) on mental models of the smart environment as one or multiple entities, trust, performance, and social variables. Our findings suggest that in this type of setting, interacting with a single agent may increase mental demand, and that agents that speak about embodied interaction in third person are perceived as more trustworthy and competent than agents that speak in first person.

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Terrence Fong, Elizabeth Carter, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi
    Journal:
    2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN), 2024
    DOI:
    10.1109/RO-MAN60168.2024.10731173
    View Paper

  • Bystander interactions with failing vehicle autonomy

    An important human factors challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be to find appropriate and acceptable methods for autonomous vehicles to express failure states to other drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. This project focused on the pedestrian-AV interaction challenge and explored forms of communication that are generalizable across autonomy type and brand. This document describes a field study and a display study. In the field study, the authors conducted interviews with pedestrians in nine settings around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where autonomous Uber vehicles were routinely being tested at the time.

    Authors:
    Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi, Samadrita Das, Cecilia G Morales, Selena Norman, Samantha Reig
    Journal:
    Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation. University Transportation Center, 2018
    Citations:
    1
    View Paper

  • Unremarkable to Remarkable AI Agent: Exploring Boundaries of Agent Intervention for Adults With and Without Cognitive Impairment

    As the population of older adults increases, there is a growing need for support for them to age in place. This is exacerbated by the growing number of individuals struggling with cognitive decline and shrinking number of youth who provide care for them. Artificially intelligent agents could provide cognitive support to older adults experiencing memory problems, and they could help informal caregivers with coordination tasks. To better understand this possible future, we conducted a speed dating with storyboards study to reveal invisible social boundaries that might keep older adults and their caregivers from accepting and using agents. We found that healthy older adults worry that accepting agents into their homes might increase their chances of developing dementia. At the same time, they want immediate access to agents that know them well if they should experience cognitive decline. Older adults in the early …

    Authors:
    Mai Lee Chang, Samantha Reig, Alicia Lee, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Nara Han, Neeta M Khanuja, Abdullah Ubed Mohammad Ali, Rebekah Martinez, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2025
    DOI:
    10.1145/3711098
    Citations:
    1
    View Paper

  • Characterizing the Role of Agent Identities in Interactions Among Individuals, Embodiments, and Services

    Keywords: Interaction design, human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, human-agent interaction, human-autonomy interaction, human-robot teaming, embodiment, re-embodiment, embodied agents, smart environments, smart homes, internet of things, user experience, personalization, mixed methods, quantitative, qualitative, user enactments, storyboards, social robots, service robots, conversational agents, virtual assistants, failure, trust, video study, story completion, loyalty, ancillary users, identity performance, mental models With the ongoing innovation of intelligent systems that coordinate and collaborate with humans, it becomes increasingly important to understand how interactions should be designed to support effective communication, social norms, and appropriately calibrated trust. These intelligent systems are becoming less and less constrained to single embodiments: voice-activated agents …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig
    Journal:
    Characterizing the Role of Agent Identities in Interactions Among Individuals, Embodiments, and Services, 2023
    Citations:
    2
    View Paper

  • Perceptions of explicitly vs. implicitly relayed commands between a robot and smart speaker

    Designers of smart-home systems must make decisions about the perceived identities and interconnectedness of their various devices. To inform these decisions, we performed an online study to examine whether people perceive multiple devices in a smart home as different interfaces for the same system, devices that talk to each other, or independent devices. We manipulated the types of devices in the system (hetero-geneous!homogeneous), how the devices relayed commands to each other (implicit/explicit), and the task requested. Participants were flexible in how they interpreted the devices, presenting an opportunity for designers to select a suitable model.

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Elizabeth J Carter, Terrence Fong, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi
    Journal:
    2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2022
    DOI:
    10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889664
    Citations:
    6
    View Paper

  • From individual rights to community obligations: a Jewish approach to speech

    The rules governing speech are complex, and speech laws in Judaism include rules about blessings, prayers, contracts, vows, promises, and more. In this article, we examine some of the halachot (laws) around interpersonal communication. These laws were codified and summarized by the Chofetz Chaim [2], and have since been further explicated by popular interpreters such as Joseph Telushkin [3]. Here, we argue that these rules can provide Hate speech, disinformation, doxing—these are all information harms spread through online speech. Questions of what is acceptable for online speech are typically framed as issues of rights. For example, as of this writing, Spotify is facing heavy criticism for hosting Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he disseminates misinformation about vaccination. Spotify has responded by arguing that Rogan’s podcast did not violate their terms of service, and therefore he has the right to …

    Authors:
    Jessica Hammer, Samantha Reig
    Journal:
    Interactions, 2022
    DOI:
    10.1145/3535271
    Citations:
    6
    View Paper

  • Go That Way: Exploring Supplementary Physical Movements by a Stationary Robot When Providing Navigation Instructions

    We describe an exploration of how kiosk-type stationary robots might provide navigation instructions for blind people. Inspired by a technique used by Orientation & Mobility experts in which a route is traced out on a person's palm, we developed five methods that supplement verbal instructions with physical movements. We explored the usability, strengths, and limitations of each of our methods in two exploratory studies with blind participants. One method, in which the robot used its entire arm to create path gestures while participants held its gripper, was preferred by 5 out of 8 blind participants and performed comparably on a recall task as a verbal-only instruction method. A closer approximation of the original palm method failed. We analyzed interview data to understand the reasons behind the failures and successes. We discuss the lessons learned from our studies about instruction methods, how robots in public …

    Authors:
    Xiang Zhi Tan, Elizabeth J Carter, Samantha Reig, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 2019
    DOI:
    10.1145/3308561.3353805
    Citations:
    8
    View Paper

  • Dynamic Agent Affiliation: Who Should the AI Agent Work for in the Older Adult's Care Network?

    The population of older adults experiencing cognitive decline is growing faster than the number of workers who can care for them. Artificially intelligent (AI) agents could assist these older adults, keeping them in their homes longer. For this to happen, older adults must be willing to adopt and rely on agents. Would they trust an agent that might need to report their decline to others? We conducted a speed dating study exploring the impact of agent affiliation (i.e., who the agent should work for). Our healthy and declining participants reacted positively to the idea of agents supporting them. They particularly recognized how the agent would reduce the burden placed on their family caregivers. They viewed affiliation to be dynamic, shifting from the declining older adult and orienting more to their caregivers over the course of cognitive decline. They envisioned the agent modifying its decision-making process to be like their …

    Authors:
    Mai Lee Chang, Alicia Lee, Nara Han, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Samantha Reig, Abdullah Ubed Mohammad Ali, Rebekah Martinez, Neeta M Khanuja, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2024
    DOI:
    10.1145/3643834.3661500
    Citations:
    8
    View Paper

  • Supporting Piggybacked Co-Located Leisure Activities via Augmented Reality

    Technology, especially the smartphone, is villainized for taking meaning and time away from in-person interactions and secluding people into “digital bubbles”. We believe this is not an intrinsic property of digital gadgets, but evidence of a lack of imagination in technology design. Leveraging augmented reality (AR) toward this end allows us to create experiences for multiple people, their pets, and their environments. In this work, we explore the design of AR technology that “piggybacks” on everyday leisure to foster co-located interactions among close ties (with other people and pets). We designed, developed, and deployed three such AR applications, and evaluated them through a 41-participant and 19-pet user study. We gained key insights about the ability of AR to spur and enrich interaction in new channels, the importance of customization, and the challenges of designing for the physical aspects of AR devices …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Erica Principe Cruz, Melissa M Powers, Jennifer He, Timothy Chong, Yu Jiang Tham, Sven Kratz, Ava Robinson, Brian A Smith, Rajan Vaish, Andrés Monroy-Hernández
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023
    DOI:
    10.1145/3544548.3580833
    Citations:
    9
    View Paper
Showing 1–10 of 26 publications