Publications

Explore our research contributions and published works

  • Robo-Identity: Exploring Artificial Identity and Emotion via Speech Interactions

    Following the success of the first edition of Robo-Identity, the second edition will provide an opportunity to expand the discussion about artificial identity. This year, we are focusing on emotions that are expressed through speech and voice. Synthetic voices of robots can resemble and are becoming indistinguishable from expressive human voices. This can be an opportunity and a constraint in expressing emotional speech that can (falsely) convey a human-like identity that can mislead people, leading to ethical issues. How should we envision an agent's artificial identity? In what ways should we have robots that maintain a machine-like stance, e.g., through robotic speech, and should emotional expressions that are increasingly human-like be seen as design opportunities? These are not mutually exclusive concerns. As this discussion needs to be conducted in a multidisciplinary manner, we welcome perspectives …

    Authors:
    Guy Laban, Sebastien Le Maguer, Minha Lee, Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos, Samantha Reig, Ilaria Torre, Ravi Tejwani, Matthew J Dennis, Andre Pereira
    Journal:
    2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2022
    DOI:
    10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889649
    Citations:
    11
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  • A Robot’s Expressive Language Affects Human Strategy and Perceptions in a Competitive Game

    As robots are increasingly endowed with social and communicative capabilities, they will interact with humans in more settings, both collaborative and competitive. We explore human-robot relationships in the context of a competitive Stackelberg Security Game. We vary humanoid robot expressive language (in the form of “encouraging” or “discouraging” verbal commentary) and measure the impact on participants' rationality, strategy prioritization, mood, and perceptions of the robot. We learn that a robot opponent that makes discouraging comments causes a human to play a game less rationally and to perceive the robot more negatively. We also contribute a simple open source Natural Language Processing framework for generating expressive sentences, which was used to generate the speech of our autonomous social robot.

    Authors:
    Aaron M Roth, Samantha Reig, Umang Bhatt, Jonathan Shulgach, Tamara Amin, Afsaneh Doryab, Fei Fang, Manuela Veloso
    Journal:
    2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2019
    DOI:
    10.1109/RO-MAN46459.2019.8956412
    Citations:
    14
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  • Perceptions of Agent Loyalty with Ancillary Users

    Intelligent agents are part of the smartphones, smart speakers, and home robots that millions of us own and interact with regularly. However, little is known about if or how these agents should be embodied. Additionally, as conversations with agents move from heavily structured and transactional to more flexible and, at times, social, embodiment may play a more nuanced and variable role. This paper describes an experimental study that examined the effects of embodiment and quality of information on people’s perceptions of an intelligent agent. We conducted a between-subjects experiment in which participants completed an escape room-like task with the “help” of an artificial personal assistant that had a robotic embodiment, a virtual embodiment, or no embodiment. Participants were given either helpful or unhelpful information about the task. Findings suggest that people can attribute the quality of loyalty to …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Elizabeth Jeanne Carter, Xiang Zhi Tan, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi
    Journal:
    International Journal of Social Robotics, 2021
    DOI:
    10.1007/s12369-020-00725-x
    Citations:
    15
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  • Smart Home Agents and Devices of Today and Tomorrow: Surveying Use and Desires

    How are people using current smart home technologies, and how do they conceptualize future ones that are more interconnected and more capable than those available today? We deployed an online survey study to 150 participants to investigate use of and opinions about smart speakers, home robots, virtual assistants, and other smart home devices. We also gauged how impressions of connected smart home devices are shaped by the way the devices interact with one another. Through a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative approach, we found that people mostly use single devices for single functions, and have simple and brief interactions with virtual assistants. However, they imagine their future devices to have more control over the physical environment (i.e., interact with each other) and envision them interacting with people in more socially complex ways. These findings motivate design …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Elizabeth Jeanne Carter, Lynn Kirabo, Terrence Fong, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 2021
    DOI:
    10.1145/3472307.3484664
    Citations:
    16
    View Paper

  • You Had Me at Hello: The Impact of Robot Group Presentation Strategies on Mental Model Formation

    Research has shown how the connections between robots' minds, bodies, and identities can be configured and performed in a variety of ways. In this work, we consider group identity observables: the set of design cues that robot groups use to perform different identity configurations. We explore how group identity observables lead observers to develop different mental models of robot groups. Specifically, we make four key contributions: (1) we define, conceptualize, and taxonomize group identity observables; (2) we use Grounded Theory-informed analysis of qualitative data to produce a taxonomy of users' mental models invoked by variation in those observables; (3) we empirically demonstrate (n=166) how variations in observables lead to different mental models; and (4) we further demonstrate how variations in those observables, and the mental models they evoke, influence key group dynamics constructs like …

    Authors:
    Alexandra Bejarano, Samantha Reig, Priyanka Senapati, Tom Williams
    Journal:
    2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2022
    DOI:
    10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889465
    Citations:
    19
    View Paper

  • Theory and Design Considerations for the User Experience of Smart Environments

    With the infusion of computation into workplaces and homes, various service settings, and everyday objects, scholars in human–computer interaction (HCI) and related domains have begun to consider the research and design implications not only of smart “things,” but of smart environments. Much of the work on smart environments to date has focused on smart homes; related work in HCI explores user values for smart homes, means of interacting with computation in smart homes (e.g., interfaces and agents), how to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders, and how to preserve user trust and autonomy. However, the smart environments of the future will not always fit the smart home mold of a coalescence of products that exist to automate and ease everyday tasks for the end users. They will be both user-focused and goal-focused, public and private, large and small, and ephemeral and long-lasting. It will benefit …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Terrence Fong, Jodi Forlizzi, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, 2022
    DOI:
    10.1109/THMS.2022.3142112
    Citations:
    21
    View Paper

  • Death of a Robot: Social Media Reactions and Language Usage when a Robot Stops Operating

    People take to social media to share their thoughts, joys, and sorrows. A recent popular trend has been to support and mourn people and pets that have died as well as other objects that have suffered catastrophic damage. As several popular robots have been discontinued, including the Opportunity Rover, Jibo, and Kuri, we are interested in how language used to mourn these robots compares to that to mourn people, animals, and other objects. We performed a study in which we asked participants to categorize deidentified Twitter reactions as referencing the death of a person, an animal, a robot, or another object. Most reactions were labeled as being about humans, which suggests that people use similar language to describe feelings for animate and inanimate entities. We used a natural language toolkit to analyze language from a larger set of tweets. A majority of tweets about Opportunity included second …

    Authors:
    Elizabeth J Carter, Samantha Reig, Xiang Zhi Tan, Gierad Laput, Stephanie Rosenthal, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, 2020
    DOI:
    10.1145/3319502.3374794
    Citations:
    33
    View Paper

  • Social Robots in Service Contexts: Exploring the Rewards and Risks of Personalization and Re-embodiment

    Social agents and robots are moving into front-line positions in brick and mortar services, taking on roles where they directly interact with customers. These agents could potentially recognize customers to personalize service. Will customers like this, or might they feel monitored and profiled? Robots could also re-embody (move their “personality” between one body and another) in order to take on multiple roles that are typically performed by different people. Will this make customers feel more taken care of, or will it raise concerns about the robot’s competence and expertise? Our work investigates when robots should and should not recognize customers and re-embody. Our online study used storyboards to present possible future interactions between robots and customers across several different service contexts. Our findings suggest that people generally accept robots identifying customers and taking on vastly …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Michal Luria, Elsa Forberger, Isabel Won, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2021
    DOI:
    10.1145/3461778.3462036
    Citations:
    33
    View Paper

  • "All Rise for the AI Director": Eliciting Possible Futures of Voice Technology through Story Completion

    How might the capabilities of voice assistants several decades in the future shape human society? To anticipate the space of possible futures for voice assistants, we asked 149 participants to each complete a story based on a brief story stem set in the year 2050 in one of five different contexts: the home, doctor's office, school, workplace, and public transit. Story completion as a method elicits participants' visions of possible futures, unconstrained by their understanding of current technological capabilities, but still reflective of current sociocultural values. Through a thematic analysis, we find these stories reveal the extremes of the capabilities and concerns of today's voice assistants---and artificial intelligence---such as improving efficiency and offering instantaneous support, but also replacing human jobs, eroding human agency, and causing harm through malfunction. We conclude by discussing how these …

    Authors:
    Julia Cambre, Samantha Reig, Queenie Kravitz, Chinmay Kulkarni
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2020 ACM designing interactive systems conference, 2020
    DOI:
    10.1145/3357236.3395479
    Citations:
    38
    View Paper

  • Flailing, Hailing, Prevailing: Perceptions of Multi-Robot Failure Recovery Strategies

    We explored different ways in which a multi-robot system might recover after one robot experiences a failure. We compared four recovery conditions: Update (a robot fixes its error and continues the task), Re-embody (a robot transfers its intelligence to a different body), Call (the failed robot summons a second robot to take its place), and Sense (a second robot detects the failure and proactively takes the place of the first robot). We found that trust in the system and perceived competence of the system were higher when a single robot recovered from a failure on its own (by updating or re-embodying) than when a second robot took over the task. We also found evidence that two robots that used the same socially interactive intelligence were perceived more similarly than two robots with different intelligences. Finally, our study revealed a relationship between how people perceive the agency of a robot and how they …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Elizabeth J Carter, Terrence Fong, Jodi Forlizzi, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2021
    DOI:
    10.1145/3434073.3444659
    Citations:
    45
    View Paper
Showing 11–20 of 26 publications