so if we could start with you
introducing yourself
all right telling us about where you
were born and went to school and
oh my goodness all right my name is
sarah keisler
i was born in washington dc and i grew
up there
my dad was a government
official in the securities and exchange
commission my mother was a biologist
and i went to college
simmons college in boston and then i
went to stanford university and when my
advisor left i left two and i
went off and got married and moved to
ohio state university and that's where i
finished up i actually did my
dissertation at gale university
but my degree is from ohio state what
did you study
i was in a psychology program
specializing in social psychology
and who was your advisor and my advice
my first advisor was
leon festinger and after that
timothy brock they were both social
psychologists
very well known experimentalists
so my background was in experimental
social psychology and i
didn't have any field experience outside
of the lab until
until uh after i graduated
so what did you work on for your thesis
oh my
thesis my thesis was a study of
gratitude but
i did a variety of studies on attitudes
and on social relations i very
quickly got interested in groups and
teams
and group work so after a while i
um specialized in group interactions
and when i came to carnegie mellon
uh there was a government
crackdown on quote social science
research
which periodically happens it looks like
it might be happening again
pretty soon and
um i decided to
look into how people were using
computers to communicate it occurred to
me that
there were a lot of
people out there saying that great
things were happening and
there was a lot of hyperbola about
better decision making and
better organizations and
better groups and so on but um
i wasn't sure so because
my actual funding at the time was
for an engineering project on consumer
participation in standard setting
but the money was held up and so i was
kind of fooling around and i decided to
run some
experiments on
people using email essentially the
equivalent of email to
or chat to communicate group decisions
and
the first subjects that we ran
couldn't come to a joint decision they
argued
they i i just couldn't figure out what
was going on
um and so and but when we put the
same people with a different decision
all together in the same room they were
fine
so i couldn't figure out what was going
on and i came over to the computer
science department at the time here
and they said oh that's flaming that
happens all the time online
and um so that was the beginning
of my studies of technology and
how it can change human behavior and
relationships
that was back in the 80s
so i did that research for a while
and
did a lot of work on group interaction
using
computers and a lot of other things
related
um at the time i was working over in the
social
sciences department at carnegie mellon
and i just got more and more interested
in new
computer-based technologies so i decided
that maybe
i wanted to change careers and work
more applied setting and you know making
making things so i moved to
california in 1998 just at the
height of the dot com
era and i worked at a company called
interval research company
and it was there that i saw my first
kind of homemade
robot
and but i wasn't
involved with that project at all
and i did a lot of work on
consumer consumer internet
services and
all kinds of things all kinds of new fun
technologies
but after about a year
i knew that um i could see the beginning
of the end of
the dot com i could see this company was
struggling
uh and they just weren't gonna make it
um there's a lot of tension around this
company
uh so um i wanna interrupt right now and
say i don't want this on
okay yeah just let us any of the just
the part about
them being in trouble yeah okay
um the microphone got flipped upside
down there
come on here
all right so where were we we were i was
at interval and i was engaged in a lot
of very interesting research
but i could tell that the uh crash was
going to come
it was pretty obvious that companies
were making claims they couldn't
we called it vaporware they just
couldn't
back it up and there were all kinds of
new online services and the world wasn't
ready yet
um not enough of the population was
willing to use a credit card online it's
amazing to think about it now but
uh so i decided to look for another job
and
at that point i considered several
things
and carnegie mellon hired me back but in
the computer science school
so i came back here
and um uh
i worked uh let's see i'm trying to
remember how i got involved with the
first
robotics project
you know i i can't remember oh yes okay
i remember now
um when i came back sebastian thrun
was just starting the nurse bot project
and he was a very broad
kind of inc inclusive
person and he was calling on nurses and
social scientists and all sorts of
people to help him build
a robot that would
uh help elders in their homes so
i joined that project and helped write
a proposal that was ultimately funded
under the so-called itr program of the
national science foundation
and it was a five-year interdisciplinary
project
to develop a nurse bot
which was a robot that would help the
elderly
and to me it was
fascinating to think that there would be
some you know robot in the house doing
things i don't think i
bought the idea of
a robot really being helpful but the
idea of interacting with the robot
um seemed pretty interesting and pearl
was very
anthropomorphic it was you know
smiled it had eyes at hand
and had a personality and
um i had a great a new graduate student
new undergraduate at the time
who uh was very interested in it as well
who was that uh her name was jennifer
[ __ ] goitz
g-o gets gets yeah it's g-o-e-t-z right
g-o-e-t-z yeah jen gets
yeah and jen i'm turned remember if she
was an undergraduate or a master's
student at the time
um i think she was an undergraduate but
i cannot remember
um so after we worked together for about
a year
um that was
you know right around 9 11. yeah i
remember that she and i worked on a
paper that very day
and she went off to berkeley
to their phd program in psychology and
now she's graduated
working at middlebury college so
anyway jen and i um
didn't have a robot well we had sort of
i mean
yeah a nurse bot was being developed so
we didn't have much access
to nurse bot but we tried
some early experiments and
having nurse but encourage elderly
people to exercise
and it was just amazing to me that
people just oh okay well i'll talk with
the robot and they just went ahead and
did it
and uh because we wanted
you know more robots to work with we we
bought these
um play robots
toy lego type robots
and we used a wizard of oz technique
which is
pretending that the robot talk you know
stand in another room put a microphone
on the robot and
have the robot talk and i still have
some
interesting videos i can show you of
people's responses to those robots
they seem to assume
that they were just like people
um and i think
now looking back on it we just thought
well
this almost seems dishonest these people
are imputing something to uh these roads
these
silly robots i mean there was a robot
that looked like a car
and i still remember a student getting
down
on the ground and looking at this car
and saying
how fast you go
um was the car actually speaking before
they did that or
yes the car had come in and say hello
i'm you know
bob and
so it was the human voice that
cued off people to just have the
expectation that everything else would
be human
so i got very interested in the subject
of anthropomorphism
of robot personality of
people's interactions um
with a robot you know how how much they
put up with a robot
and i had various students that had all
kinds of conjectures well should a robot
be bossy or should it be
to take advice or give advice and
i mean do people want to be talked down
to by a robot that knows more than you
do
and i had a post.com who was
very interested in um
the kinds of knowledge that we impute to
robots and for example um
her name is venus lee and she's now
at uh and us a university in
singapore and um
she had the idea that if if people
thought a robot was built
in china then it would know of course
all about the great wall
and about beijing and other things and
if
if it were built in new york then people
would assume the robot knew all about
the empire state building and
even less well-known venues so
yeah so that got me
started and our experiments went very
well
sometimes you know you'll go into a
research area and it's a struggle
to get something i mean it just
seems like well i've been there many
times
but this was uh
comparatively easy
and it was interesting at first the
reception in the robotics community was
well this has nothing to do with
robotics
where did you try to publish it first
where was this
um
we sent our first
i'm trying to think where do we send our
first
oh no i i'm trying to think whether it
was
the kai khan sikkai conference or
whether it was some
robotics conference but all i remember
it was turned down and people thought it
was
ridiculous but
i was convinced we had something there
so
we sent an improved uh oh well
yeah i i should say the early studies
also
had problems with measurement we
we didn't know how to ask people
questions for example we thought well
we'll ask them about a robot doing
such and such a thing and then we'll ask
about a human doing such and such a
thing and we'll
compare their answers but what we
realized was that a robot
for example writing and a human writing
are two completely different things that
people's standards are based on
each species if you will
for example if you say oh my dog
communicates she's hungry and
my child communicates she's hungry
people don't see this as the same
message
because their basis of comparison with
the child
is with children and with dogs is with
dogs so
robots seem to be their own category and
you can't use the usual kind of control
groups and so on that
i had assumed we could use so
um so we did struggle a little bit even
with um
you know how to do convincing credible
experiments
how to make them come across so people
felt designers of robots and people who
worked with robots would think this is
useful
this is something i needed to know
so the first real success was called
it's called the roman
conference and i can't it was started
originally it originally was a japanese
conference
um on robotics
i forget what roman means something
about it's like human robot
yeah it's human robot robots interacting
with humans
and so the first paper was
presented there now this was not a
big deal conference it wasn't even
archival but it was the first time we've
gotten something
accepted and so we went there and i
remember we got a best paper award
and i was just shocked they loved it
yeah so um
yeah so that you know when you have a
success like that
where all these people that have known
been in a field for
25 years you know they they give you a
uh
you know other way i mean it could have
been a blue ribbon i don't know but
it was encouraging and we felt like well
we're on the right track
what was the paper on that study had to
do with
um it was one that jen and i did
together having to do with
matching a robot's personality to the
type of task the robot is supposed to do
so a lot of people at the time were
talking a lot about
emotional robots that would be social
and fun
and people would love them and
it seemed to me that you know if you go
to the doctor with a serious
illness you don't want the doctor to be
happy and fun and
making jokes you know you want the
doctor's demeanor to be
matched to your condition and i thought
the robot's demeanor also should be
matched to the kind of task it was doing
with you
so we ran a very cool experiment in
which
the robot was either
training you to do yoga exercises
and some of them pretty difficult or
training you to do a jelly bean task
where you're trying to make new recipes
out of different
flavors of jelly beans and so one task
was more serious than the other
and we varied the robot's personality in
one case it told jokes and
in the other case it professed sympathy
for all the effort you were
taking and the difficulty of holding
these positions
and so on and it worked we got very
strong
results that they liked the happy funny
robot
when they were doing the jelly bean task
and they liked the
serious caring robot when they were
doing the yoga task
so that was that study
and you know we've done other studies
along those lines
after that um having to do with
making a robot adaptive to a person's
context and you know life situation
yeah so so you had the
the first kind of big success at roman
and how did that inspire you to continue
or
what other well we still we had um so by
that time
sebastian was moving to stanford i
remember he tried to talk me into going
as well and
we should not put this in the video
either
okay
um yeah so that project
was just about ending and they were
changing personnel on
it so i i did
take pearl so i still have pearl in our
kitchen
lab which i can show you if you'd like
to see it
and we continued to do studies with
pearl
um and we did a lot of you know fun
projects with pearl and but at the time
i got um pretty interested in how robots
would be designed physically you know
what their
form factor would be and should they be
big or small i mean
big didn't seem to go very well in
people's homes and too small would mean
they'd be bending over
[Music]
so um i i
paired up with jody for lizzie and we
submitted another grant proposal to do
cognitive and social design of of robots
and we got that award too
and that was another big big project
a multi-million dollar project and so
then we were able to bring in a whole
bunch of students and design
students and behavioral students and
robotics students
and you know they all worked together we
met
as a big lab and
we worked on just a variety of subjects
aaron powers
we brought in and he had been in my
human factors class we hired him
as lab manager and so we did
just um a whole run of
very successful studies i think
um not all at that point because
jody was interested in going to homes
and studying
robots and homes we um
we went out in the field and her
students went out in the field
so we started expanding our methods and
thinking
a lot more broadly um
and so what else um
did you had when you were designing uh
pearl
did you have input in the way pearl
looked okay
yes one of our early projects
was to redesign pearl's head
we the early pearl
was based on an earlier robot called
flow and it had a led
mouth that was it was
at the time it just didn't work properly
it didn't have expression so you
couldn't smile
and so we decided to design a head and i
wanted
a head that was modular that you could
change
the lips from gray to pink if it were
female
you could make it the eyes big or small
you could change the eyebrows and
make we also wanted the the form of the
head
to change i wanted to know if there's
old research showing the baby
people like baby faces so he made a
round head
and then we added you know chin or
height to give more
quote intelligence to the robot and and
if you added the chin and the head then
it started looking like a monkey
um or an ape so yeah we
did that that was a big project to
redesign
pearl's head um
and we did other you know lots of other
studies on interactions um
on how robots should give advice and
my student christine torre did her
dissertation on that
that work so we had several
dissertations
carl de salvo who's now at georgia tech
and uh kristin is now at university of
michigan in the postdoc
program um aaron went on to irobot
and he's now changing jobs but i can't
remember that
he's coming to a going to a new company
and i know i'm forgetting someone else
there was [ __ ]
okay yeah bill gay was
uh wonderful he he went
uh yeah he also graduated his
his work was on gays and
modeling human gaze and then making uh
robots that could
gate and change their gaze like people
do
and we did all sorts of fun things
for example when people are
lying they'll often
like if you ask them do you like this
object or that object better
and a liar is trying to dissuade you
they'll quickly look at the one that
they
really like first and um we got a robot
to do that too and
and the same things happened in terms of
giving people cues about lying so
yeah that was a lot of fun another thing
that bilge did
was to go into hospitals and look at a
hospital robots and i forgot to say also
that this
big project we had was also a
collaboration with stanford university
and so my former student pamela hines
got involved in robots she was also
taken in by the whole thing and she so
she now has her own
uh line of research on that but at the
time we collaborated
on a bunch of things and we created a
you know special issue of um
what was it the hci journal on
in uh human robot interaction
yeah and was that the first about the
first time that somebody had
kind of put together a special issue on
hri
or or some
um you know i think it was
it was certainly the first time that
sort of what i call
scientific studies
were put together with empirical data
and so on there were other
social robotic pieces
but i think that might have been the
first time
that a whole bunch of people did
systematic empirical work not all of it
was
quantitative some was qualitative but
you know systematic
studies of human robot interaction
so we meant it as kind of a an
introduction to a new field
and we thought well if we're going to do
this then
it needs to be an area of research it
needs more people and we need to
encourage more people to be interested
and
involved in it and and it worked
so um but some of this is muddled in my
head
you know the different histories of i
can't remember for example who
decided we needed to have a human robot
interaction conference i know i was at
the first one but
i can't remember how
that happened i think um
i mean i didn't run it that's for sure
but
i know that at some point a whole bunch
of us got together and said wait a
minute we need to have
a really good conference and not just
uh kind of essays and
things but some real research
you know good research who was in that
initial group of people
well alan schultz had a lot to do with
the construction of it i mean he was
very much into that and he and greg
crafton
who's um i mean they're they're doing
and they were doing interdisciplinary
work at the time
so it was the various groups around that
were doing interdisciplinary
research um and we're you know
interested in being involved and you
know cynthia brazil
and i mean just uh every i think anybody
who's
anybody now was and they were you know
they
they were all involved from the
beginning
i think
so you know except you guys that were
the students
kind of came in after that
so for the organizing in terms of
organizing the first
conferences um yeah i mean you were
involved and
oh yeah i was on a program committee
because
i was very concerned would we i mean we
didn't know would we even get any papers
would people want to come there are
plenty of conferences around
i mean we didn't know if it would work
but it seemed to generate some interest
and
excitement you know i mean we had this
uh
another thing pam and i applied for
money
for a graduate student workshop or
conference and we did that out in carmel
and that was amazingly fun and we got
uh scabs out there
and uh a professor from korea
and pam and i yeah
jody yeah and a whole bunch of students
and i'm really glad we did that
most people do workshops for the monkey
monks you know the high up people but
we really wanted to do a something for
graduate students that would build the
field and
make sure that they there was a cohort
that knew each other that
when we were all gone there would be
something left
and i think that worked kind of well
yeah
yeah i was there so i'm on all of us we
were very
impressed to be there and it was great
yeah
thank you yeah the only issue was that
there were
i mean i was amazed there were three
times as many people
applying to go there as we could
possibly accommodate
so it was difficult because people who
weren't chosen
you know naturally didn't have that
initial
you know start with all the contacts and
help with each other so
so how has the conference been
developing you know from the first one
who were the kinds of people who
decided to come to that one and did you
get a lot of submissions
yes we got um
we did i mean i think the selection rate
was only
uh it started maybe 35
something like that and then it went
down and down and down i think last year
was only 24
or something like that which meant that
we had
um you know a standard
rate for very good conferences 24
selection or less and
so we must have had maybe um
200 or 250 submissions
um allen was very strong on having a one
track
conference and his idea was if you're
going to have an interdisciplinary
conference
and everybody's got to be in the same
room because if you have
a design track a behavioral track and
a computer science track then
you know they'll all separate and go to
different rooms
and there won't be any interaction
so uh
we decided to have a one track
conference and that has
meant that we've had to limit
and you know limit the number of papers
and limit the conference itself
so um it was at the beginning
pretty informal i mean the people who
were interested in volunteering they
volunteered
there were no elections there was nobody
that said whose boss um
you know it's mumble mumble mumble okay
this is
your now program committee
and it was a lot based on volunteers
who decided yeah i want to run things so
so alan was very interested in
running it and getting it started and
because he was with the navy
lab he had some resources to get it
going
and julie adams and holly yanko and
various people
volunteered to you know try to get
sponsors and
and well all the things you need to do
so um
the last uh the last conference
it started you know you have this okay
it's beginning it's new
we're on the headed for the new future
and then
you start to hear complaints how come
she's on the program committee and i'm
not on the program committee you know
who appointed you
to be boss well
we started to hear rumblings at the last
conference and so
we had a meeting invited everybody
um who was on the so-called program
committee and
conference committee and it was a huge
group because people came who weren't
invited
and um and we decided well we have to
now become a little more bureaucratic we
have to have some rules we have to have
um standards we have to be on the same
page with regard to
what country we're meeting in is this
really international or is it national
and there was a a lot of concern about
you know right in the middle of a
recession having a conference
an international conference it's still
an issue
you know i don't know the next
conference is in switzerland
i don't know who's going to be able to
afford
to go there um
and but we decided well you know
if we want to be international we have
to meet internationally and the
europeans were
very insistent on that so the conference
started as an american conference but
pretty quickly if you want to be
in robotics you've got to be
international because um
japanese and europeans are so active in
robotics and
in many ways ahead of us so we can't be
too nationalistic uh so
there has been a group that's been
working online
all year trying to systematize
the conference and
uh we also decided to have a journal
and now we've been working all year
off and on you know keep on
plugging away at the difficulties of
starting a journal
and we don't want it to be a traditional
journal so
there was a lot of discussion about that
how is it going to be different um
well it will be free for one thing and
it'll be online
and we're going to try to experiment
with new kinds of articles
for example short articles um tutorials
um pieces for children just
all you know i mean if it's online it
can be anything
and it doesn't have to all look like a
book in a
journal so people have different
opinions but we'll have different
sections and you know they'll do
different things
but uh we're going to try to experiment
with con
content so that you know as long as the
writing is good and the presentations
are good
it it will be a little bit different the
other thing we're going to do
is have additional material available
such as videos in fact you know
this video could be linked to it and
then you'd have
an issue that dealt with maybe
hri's history and then you might have a
link to
videos and inter and interviews with
with people who are involved so
yeah or data sets are another one so
people who want to do data mining
and want large data sets could access
data sets that are kept at the journal
website right and there's been this long
as far as i know there was some
desire to have for example videos and
that kind of thing online so that more
people could
do the research right but that didn't go
anywhere
yeah but the idea now is to allow for
all kinds of ideas for special issues
and for
yeah so our much more open
to the contributions of others
um for example
after um some roboticists saw
or snackbot robot
wow my robot doesn't have to look like
this
idiotic piece of machinery it can
actually have a head
it can look you know fun and and people
love it they're going to give it a name
and
so uh they brought in you know designers
and
and um design
thinking to try to
make a robot just look like
it fits in this very world and not in
some other world
i think also the
kinds of work that bilga did for example
on modeling human gaze has
that technique of watching humans very
closely
and then modeling that
i think has opened up um
uh roboticists to think about how you
could create
human models for robots
um another development is
um hiroshi ishiguro
in japan has
been a huge
fan of behavioral science
and its contribution he's uh
i mean he's a leading person
in human robot interaction he's created
these androids that
interact and from early
when he first started building these um
he reached out to behavioral
people like carl mcdorman
and you know others
uh bill day bill gate went over and
worked there
and furthermore he saw that a lot of
um that help came from the u.s
and it linked him with um
another you know culture and
that our science was better their
robotics was better our science was
better
so by putting us together he could get
his papers published
in scientific journals and and we had
you know the value of having uh
robov as uh one of the robovs came over
to university of washington
at peter kahn's lab
and conda went over there
so this
you know greater interaction with
people in other countries has really
helped as they've seen the
value of these different
perspectives um
but that's
you know there's several levels of
interdisciplinary work there's one level
that's just
you make a proposal to a granting agency
and you mention
three disciplines and it all looks
wonderful
and there's a theme a title
and then they go their separate ways
after they get the money
and then the next level is well they
have some sort of cooperation
maybe they send each other students um
they have meet maybe a kick-off meeting
and they maybe they even build a robot
but still the work is not really
integrated
and then there's the third level which
is
truly integrated interdisciplinary work
and that's still pretty darn hard
i would say um jody and i have a project
with
a roboticist over at intel
and this robot is called herb
and herb has arms that grasp
and you know it's been a struggle to
figure out how this robot
should hand you things so
when the robot was first developed
um it it picked up say a bottle of water
and stuck it in your face because it
didn't know
that you're not supposed to hand things
that way
and so the question now is how do you
model
the way it should be given that the
robot is not going to be able to act
just like a person
because handing over an object is really
there are really two people there when i
hand you something i wait and see if
you're ready to take it
and you give me a signal by maybe
looking at me
and then i adjust what i'm doing to you
so this is a two-way street there
that's very very hard to do with the
robot because how does a robot really
know
what your intent is and so it's still
very hard
to collaborate and to try to help
advance robotics and and our
understanding of what it should be
um it's it's still a very hard
hard thing and in part it's because of
constraints of the hardware
the software and also of our ability to
model humans at a very detailed level
so it's one thing to say well people
show their intent and they look you in
the eye but
exactly when do they do this because the
robot doesn't know
generalities it has to know and exactly
on what second is it supposed to look to
you
look try to you know make eye contact
and at what second does it move its arm
forward
and when does it actually release um
you know what are the exact chews that
it needs so
it's extremely hard to
try to integrate
information at the level of human cues
and robotic movements
so that that's a hard problem and so i
feel that uh
we still struggle and uh to to integrate
our work
yeah and so who have been your
collaborators across the years other
than sebastian thrun
particularly from the robotic side from
the robotics side
well i've collaborated a little bit with
reid simmons
with his robot herb
with paul ribsky who's
working on our snackbot project
and with um
let's see on specific robots
see who else i know i'm forgetting
something
somebody being upset
what were some of the key theoretical
concepts that you brought from
social psychology or um in computer
interaction into the field
well i think i was the first person and
i
this could be disputed but i brought
the first thing i wanted to do was bring
in
this idea of mental models of people
having a mental model of what a robot is
and what a robot's doing
so um i had done some other work on
mental models and expectations and
so that was one of the concepts another
one was this idea of common ground
and i mean that just spread like
wildfire all in fact that was
uh the concept that was the conceptual
um theme of of a paper i
did for another roma ran another romance
conference
yeah the idea that um there's give and
take between the robot and human and
they have to reach common ground and
they have to adjust each other's
behavior to this common ground
and another one um
well there was act uh my student ben
lee has been working in
behavioral decision theory in behavioral
economics and how
in biases and decision making and i've
sent all of my students over to work
with george lowenstein
who's a very famous behavioral decision
theorist
and they brought back ideas from there
to use in our in our research and so men
definitely took it to heart and she will
have a paper
i think at the kai conference now on
using behavioral economics
in design and now i have a new graduate
student that also
has that interest and she
she's very interested in in having
behavioral economics
affect um uh robotics
robotic design so
um i think
uh my work is different from many other
you know many others i guess because i
usually do use
um theoretical concepts whether they're
from social psych or from some other
field because i need a theoretical
framework to know how to go forward
that's just a pretty
abstract thinker i guess and i need
that kind of framing to give people an
idea what the heck i'm trying to do it's
not just
for this robot this time this particular
setting
we want the robot to do x but you know
why
do we want all this and there are some
principles i think that
need to motivate human robot interaction
yeah so um i mean we've used all kinds
of things ideas about stereotyping
when we talk about anthropomorphism um
you know why is it that people like
pearl with a baby face well it has to do
with
people's automate automated stereotypes
that they
just bring to mind they can't help it um
or why is it that they
expect a pearl with red lips and a
female voice
to know more about dating than pearl
with the male voice
and and um gray lips
um uh
so you know we we've used yeah we've
used
a lot of concepts from psychology and
social psychology
and from communication theory
and how do you think the do you think
that
learning about human robot interaction
has given you
kind of a different understanding also
of of human psychology
well i became extremely interested in
anthropomorphism because of what i saw
people doing with um with the robots
that were
well they were kind of wizard of oz but
some of them
had very little and so
as a result of that
i became interested in how people
anthropomorphize
animals and in fact i have a study
published
in a journal called anthrazois
which came about as a result of
just this wondering where is this coming
from and what influence is that
and we even ran a study where we gave
uh betta fish to
as pets and
looked at the development of their
attachment over time and their
anthropomorphism and in that was an
experiment in which half the people were
given a pet of their very own and the
other half
were given a betta fish just to take
care of it
temporarily until we could get there
supposedly
and we were looking for how the act of
ownership
of of something of an animal
of a pet or any object for that matter
changes people's reactions to their
antimorphism and their attachment
and we did another project called the
pet rock
project in which we gave people a rock
and had them paint it anything they
wanted
and then we looked at their attachment
to it their willingness to sell it
their um their price um
and their also did they
attach person you know their own
personality characteristics to the rock
which they did and that study was
published in a consumer
research uh journal so
you know as a result of this uh it's you
know sometimes sparks
other things i tend to be uh
not too constrained by my own
field and so if i do something that's
fun and
seems like it's worth publishing
somewhere
i do go off and do it how is it being a
social psychologist in a computer
science department
well i don't think anybody knows i'm a i
i just got elected
to the to be an acm fellow
and i'm not sure possibly the committee
and they must have looked at
my background but it wasn't it wasn't
because of
my work as a social psychologist
that's passed no it's you know for
contributions
in the broader field of information
and technology
now i can't say that i've made any
contributions to computer science per se
and where do you see the field of hris
going what are the new i think it's at
across
roads um
first of all it turns out that it's
really really hard to build
um economical robots that make sense
i think irobot has done an incredible
job
of selling you know vacuums that people
will actually buy but there aren't too
many other
commercial robots around that are
i mean there's of course industrial
robots but
um we don't have a nurse but we're not
gonna have one for
a long time so um
there's a real issue with um also with
whether you need an embodied robot to do
a lot of things
there are many devices that
do lots of stuff like remind well there
was an idea that you should have a robot
on your countertop that would remind you
to
how to cook or how to save you know how
to exercise or to cut
your eating but why do you need a robot
why can't that just be your iphone that
pops up and reminds you um
so uh it's not clear
to me whether um
there will be an hri it might be
that we have to think about all you know
more and more globally and
you know the funny thing is is that um
i believe the kai conference may have
gotten more
submissions in hri
than the hri conference did this year
there were
i'm probably exaggerating yeah i am
exaggerating but there were
um many submissions and i couldn't
since i'm on both committees i couldn't
figure out why it is that
museum robots toy robots
you know um uh nursing robots all these
different kinds of robots are now
being sent to the kai conference rather
than the hri conference
for example a robot that um is doing
helping a hospital and there was a study
about
touch whether a robot should touch a
person and how
why is this at the kai conference not at
the hri conference
um this says to me that kai
is starting to say wait a minute hri is
really hci
we want it so
if um if these fields you know these
fields could easily merge and it could
threaten
hri as um something you know separate
and special
so it's possible i i the research won't
go away but
whether it's its own field or whether it
drifts towards
ikra or some of the robotics fields or
towards kai
it could split off like that and a lot
of it will
depend on um
on you know the jobs and the hiring and
whether people will actually be able to
make a career in hri right now
um it's really
a question to me whether that's possible
i i kind of think that departments
in say computer science are not going to
hire people who are
just doing hri they're going to want
something broader
than that
and do you have any advice then for
young
young people who would be interested
into going in the hri
direction oh i think it's uh extremely
challenging but i think
um having a broader conceptual picture
or a broader um
array of you know things you're working
on
would be a very good idea so that you're
not
pigeonholed into a too narrow
field and all your contacts are you know
too
redundant so
i'm all for having you know
specialization but also having some
breath
great thank you yeah thank you
all right