Publications

Explore our research contributions and published works

  • Leveraging Robot Embodiment to Facilitate Trust and Smoothness

    Interactions with social robots in public and private spaces are becoming more and more common and varied. As this trend continues, it is important to understand how a robot's embodiment influences its ability to calibrate trust and comfort with its users and behave in accordance with social norms. This is especially true when one social intelligence embodies multiple physical robots (re-embodiment). We have conducted two studies-one quantitative and and one qualitative-which shed light on the way robots should be embodied and re-embodied by intelligences during different types of social interactions. This paper outlines our previous work on elucidating the role of embodiment in social interactions and experimenting with re-embodiment as a design paradigm, and it describes the directions in which we plan to take this research in the near future.

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Jodi Forlizzi, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    2019 14th ACM/IEEE international Conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), 2019
    DOI:
    10.1109/HRI.2019.8673226
    Citations:
    48
    View Paper

  • From One to Another: How Robot-Robot Interaction Affects Users' Perceptions Following a Transition Between Robots

    Human-robot interactions that involve multiple robots are becoming common. It is crucial to understand how multiple robots should transfer information and transition users between them. To investigate this, we designed a 3 × 3 mixed-design study in which participants took part in a navigation task. Participants interacted with a stationary robot who summoned a functional (not explicitly social) mobile robot to guide them. Each participant experienced the three types of robot-robot interaction: representative (the stationary robot spoke to the participant on behalf of the mobile robot), direct (the stationary robot delivered the request to the mobile robot in a straightforward manner), and social (the stationary robot delivered the request to the mobile robot in a social manner). Each participant witnessed only one type of robot-robot communication: silent (the robots covertly communicated), explicit (the robots acknowledged …

    Authors:
    Xiang Zhi Tan, Samantha Reig, Elizabeth J Carter, Aaron Steinfeld
    Journal:
    2019 14th ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), 2019
    DOI:
    10.1109/HRI.2019.8673304
    Citations:
    63
    View Paper

  • Wait, Can You Move the Robot?: Examining Telepresence Robot Use in Collaborative Teams

    Telepresence robots provide remote team members with embodied presence, but whether this improves remote teammate participation, remote users' perceptions of team collaboration, or collocated members' perceptions of remote teammates is an open question. We conducted an experiment in which teams of two collocated members and one telepresent (remote) member solved a word puzzle requiring a translation key. We varied who had access to the key to examine effects of resource accessibility in distributed groups: in the Robot Information condition, the remote pilot (RP) possessed the key; in the Shared Information condition, all team members possessed the key; in the Local Information condition, only collocated participants (CPs) possessed the key. Audio transcripts were analyzed for differences in the number of words spoken by each team member. RPs spoke significantly less than CPs, especially …

    Authors:
    Brett Stoll, Samantha Reig, Lucy He, Ian Kaplan, Malte F Jung, Susan R Fussell
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2018
    DOI:
    10.1145/3171221.3171243
    Citations:
    71
    View Paper

  • Not Some Random Agent: Multi-person Interaction with a Personalizing Service Robot

    Service robots often perform their main functions in public settings, interacting with more than one person at a time. How these robots should handle the affairs of individual users while also behaving appropriately when others are present is an open question. One option is to design for flexible agent embodiment: letting agents take control of different robots as people move between contexts. Through structured User Enactments, we explored how agents embodied within a single robot might interact with multiple people. Participants interacted with a robot embodied by a singular service agent, agents that re-embody in different robots and devices, and agents that co-embody within the same robot. Findings reveal key insights about the promise of re-embodiment and co-embodiment as design paradigms as well as what people value during interactions with service robots that use personalization.

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Michal Luria, Janet Z Wang, Danielle Oltman, Elizabeth Jeanne Carter, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, 2020
    DOI:
    10.1145/3319502.3374795
    Citations:
    71
    View Paper

  • A Field Study of Pedestrians and Autonomous Vehicles

    Autonomous vehicles have been in development for nearly thirty years and recently have begun to operate in real-world, uncontrolled settings. With such advances, more widespread research and evaluation of human interaction with autonomous vehicles (AV) is necessary. Here, we present an interview study of 32 pedestrians who have interacted with Uber AVs. Our findings are focused on understanding and trust of AVs, perceptions of AVs and artificial intelligence, and how the perception of a brand affects these constructs. We found an inherent relationship between favorable perceptions of technology and feelings of trust toward AVs. Trust in AVs was also influenced by a favorable interpretation of the company's brand and facilitated by knowledge about what AV technology is and how it might fit into everyday life. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to surface AV-related interview data from pedestrians in a …

    Authors:
    Samantha Reig, Selena Norman, Cecilia G Morales, Samadrita Das, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 10th international conference on automotive user interfaces and interactive vehicular applications, 2018
    DOI:
    10.1145/3239060.3239064
    Citations:
    113
    View Paper

  • Re-Embodiment and Co-Embodiment: Exploration of social presence for robots and conversational agents

    Interactions with multiple conversational agents and social robots are becoming increasingly common. This raises new design challenges: Should agents and robots be modeled after humans, presenting their entity (i.e., social presence) as bound to a single body, or should they take advantage of non-human capabilities, such as moving their social presence from body to body across service touchpoints and contexts? We conducted a User Enactments study in which participants interacted with agents that had one social presence per body, that could re-embody (move their social presence from body to body), and that could co-embody (move their social presence into a body that already contains another). Reactions showed that participants felt comfortable with re-embodying agents, who created more seamless and efficient experiences. Yet situations that required expertise or concentration raised concerns about …

    Authors:
    Michal Luria, Samantha Reig, Xiang Zhi Tan, Aaron Steinfeld, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman
    Journal:
    Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2019
    DOI:
    10.1145/3322276.3322340
    Citations:
    149
    View Paper
Showing 21–26 of 26 publications