UIST 2018

Designing robots for ubiquitous, everyday use requires understanding how robots are perceived, and can be adopted and supported in open-ended, natural social circumstances. This, in turn, requires design and evaluation methodologies that go beyond dyadic and small group interactions in laboratories that have largely been the focus of research in human-robot interaction. In this talk, I will present alternative perspectives on the design and evaluation of socially interactive robotic technologies in real-world contexts, focusing on several case studies of socially assistive robots in eldercare.I will first discuss how older adults make sense of robots for use in their homes, in relation to the broader social contexts in which they live, as part of collaborative design activities, and in the course of month-long implementations of robots in their homes. These in-home studies bring up various issues relating to the types of data older adults and the clinicians who work with them would like to collect, related privacy concerns, impacts on other people in the home, and how robot designs can support the relationships older adults hope to have with and through robots. Secondly, I will explore the institutional and community-based use and design of robots in different eldercare facilities, including a nursing home, a retirement community, and an intergenerational daycare. These studies bring out how robots fit into and affect the institutional and group dynamics of interaction, and also allow us to explore how robots might be envisioned as technologies that can support not only individual, but community-level goals.

Through these case studies of eldercare robots, as emerging ubiquitous interactive technologies, I will bring out themes that can inform the design and study of pervasive systems, including collaborative design, the use of data collected during social interactions with and around technologies, related ethical concerns, and the need for incorporating the aims of groups, institutions, and communities in the design of intelligent interactive technologies.

Along with her position at IU, Šabanović has been a Visiting Professor at Bielefeld University's Cluster of Excellence in Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), a lecturer in Stanford University's Program in Science, Technology and Society, and a visiting scholar at the Intelligent Systems Institute in AIST, Tsukuba, Japan and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. She was awarded IU’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 2013, and the Trustee’s Teaching Award in 2016 and 2018. She currently serves as the Co-Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, and was the General Chair of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2018). She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2007, with a dissertation on the cross-cultural study of social robotics design in Japan and the US.