Doctoral candidate Kate Tsui will be hosting the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction doctoral consortium (http://hripioneers.org/hri10/) on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 in Osaka, Japan. This Young Pioneers workshop, to be held in conjunction with the HRI 2010 conference, aims to bring together graduate student researchers to present their current research to an audience of their peers in an interactive setting prior to the main conference (March 3-5). New this year, the Young Pioneers workshop will host a Career Panel with four distinguished panelists from all over the world and at different stages of careers.

Kate will also present two posters featuring her and her colleagues' work on Wednesday, March 3 at the reception (6pm). The first poster is research on indirect bystander interaction by Kate Tsui, Munjal Desai, and Holly Yanco.

Abstract: As robots become more pervasive in society, people will find themselves actively interacting with robots, and also rushing past them without any explicit interaction. People are able to maneuver in crowded situations by speeding up or slowing down to slip in between open pockets where people are not standing or walking.

We investigated the level of trust that a bystander has of a robotic system in a corridor passing scenario by asking people to watch short videos of such scenarios where the hallway is only wide enough to accommodate two entities (either human or robot). We found that for our four types of robots, all should move in the manner that people do: continue at a relatively constant speed unless there is need to yield, in which case the robot should slow or stop.

The second poster is research on custom heuristics for evaluating assistive robots by Kate Tsui, Kareem Abu-Zahra, Renato Casipe, Jason M'Sadoques, and Jill Drury.

Abstract: We developed a set of heuristics that was tailored to the Assistive Robotics domain using the Model-Human Processor as a framework augmented with principles gleaned from the literature. Specifically, we examined the literature of cognitive science, interaction design for people with disabilities, and social robotics. 

We validated the heuristics via comparing the results of two heuristic evaluations: one performed using Nielsenʼs heuristics and the other using our Assistive Robotics heuristics. Nielsenʼs heuristics exposed 13 problems versus 33 for the Assistive Robotics heuristics, with 7 of these problems identified by both evaluations.