CS Talk
April 3, 2012
10:30 a.m., AKW 200

Speaker: Leila Takayama
Title: Embodied Virtuality: Making sense of agentic objects

Abstract: We encounter and interact with non-human agents every day when withdrawing cash from ATMs, driving cars with anti-lock brakes, and tuning our thermostats. Through a combination of controlled experiments and field studies, this talk will examine the ways that people make sense of agentic objects, including (1) how we interact *with* agentic objects like voice agents and personal robots, and (2) how we interact *through* agentic objects like telepresence robots. Drawing from the theories that informed ubiquitous computing (aka: embodied virtuality), we can see how people make sense of agentic objects, thereby providing implications for both theory and the design of interactive systems.


Bio: Leila Takayama is a research scientist at Willow Garage, studying human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction. Dr. Takayama completed her PhD in Communication at Stanford University in 2008. She also holds a PhD minor in Psychology from Stanford, MA in Communication from Stanford, and BAs in Psychology and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley (2003). During her graduate studies, she was a research assistant in the User Interface Research (UIR) group at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Her thesis, titled “Throwing Voices: Investigating the Psychological Effects of the Spatial Location of Projected Voices,” won the Nathan Maccoby outstanding dissertation award. She is a member of the global agenda council on robotics and smart devices for the World Economic Forum as well as editor for the inaugural issue of the Journal of Human-Robot Interaction.

Her research interests include embodied cognition and the social and cognitive psychology of interacting with non-human agents. Her current focus is understanding human encounters with robots in terms of how they perceive, understand, feel about, and interact with robots. She is interested in how people come to feel that their tools are invisible-in-use (e.g., tele-operated robots) and potentially change their perspectives on the world. She also studies how people engage with non-human agents (e.g., autonomous robots). Though her primary method of inquiry is controlled experiments, she is constantly expanding her methodological toolkit by learning and using field studies, surveys, interviews, archival studies, etc., depending upon what is most effective for addressing the research questions at hand.

http://www.leilatakayama.org