Talk: Designing the New Everyday AI: Implications for Future Interactions with Embodied Agents

Abstract: We are starting to see novel human-artificial intelligence (AI) interaction paradigms come to life in home, work, and service settings: people interacting with multiple robots at a time and over long periods, using voice agents in socially complex settings across many different devices, and sharing (wittingly or not) their personal information with AI products and services. These novel interaction paradigms can be difficult to design for and implement in light of human-autonomy trust, privacy expectations, and people’s varied mental models of AI. For example, should each member of a team have their own conversational agent, or should there be one agent for everyone? How should designers and developers weigh the value of personalized interaction and humanlike communication against the potential risks of violated boundaries and miscalibrated expectations? In this talk, I will describe how nonhuman social behaviors and AI “identities” – characteristics that give an agent or robot a defined social presence – open doors to new and promising kinds of human-system interaction. I will present research findings that explore the impacts of system identity presentation on service design and outcomes in multi-user, multi-interface settings, and provide insights on how these might best be developed and deployed. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this work for multi-embodiment systems and smart environments.

Bio: Samantha Reig is a human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher and a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work combines research-through-design, empirical, and survey methods to understand and shape human-AI interaction design paradigms. She has published papers on topics such as robot re-embodiment, human-agent interaction in smart environments, and pedestrians’ experiences with autonomous vehicles in top ACM and IEEE venues. Her work on service robot personalization received honorable mention. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and by NASA through a Graduate Research Fellowship. She has collaborated with scholars of HCI and robotics at NASA, Snap Research, and various academic institutions.