Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.

Would you train for a tennis match in chaotic outdoor conditions from day one, or would you first perfect your fundamentals in a controlled…

"Leveraging Large Language Models for Learning Complex Legal Concepts through Storytelling," published by the Association for Computat…

This project explores multi-person conversation flow, likening it to a dance where participants must coordinate their steps effectively. Ef…

Background: Empathy is a driving force in our connection to others, our mental well-being, and resilience to challenges. With the rise of…

Empathy serves as a cornerstone in enabling prosocial behaviors, and can be evoked through sharing of personal experiences in stories.…

The EMPATHICSTORIES++ dataset is collected from a month-long in-the-wild deployment of 41 participants (across 269 sessions with 53 hours o…

The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies presents new opportunities to support daily living for older adults. This proje…

Children today are more digitally connected than ever before, with increasing exposure to tablets, social media, and smartphones. As techno…

In "A HeARTfelt Robot", we designed a social robot interaction for children age 7-11 that helped them practice their social-emotional learn…

This project aimed at enhancing the social-emotional and educational experiences of Arabic-speaking refugee children. The project leverages…

Foundation models have become invaluable in advancing the medical field. Despite their promise, the strategic deployment of LLMs for effect…

Today's children will live in a world saturated with artificial intelligence. Understanding the key idea behind the functioning of intellig…

Despite living in an increasingly connected world, loneliness and social isolation are prevalent issues today. While social robots have bee…

In a series of design workshops, the HRI Equitable Design framework from previous work (see Ostrowski et al. 2022) was expanded to a worksh…

We are building autonomous agents that are socially and emotionally saturated in single-person (child-robot) or multi-party (child-parent-r…

We create and employ ethical design frameworks to work towards equitable and inclusive HRI research and technologies.

An embodied virtual agent is a promising oracle for delivering appropriate just-in time interventions. We aim to build a system and design …

How can we make embodied agents have multimodal conversation with individual and group users that is not only natural, but also relational,…

We seek to empower everyone to become conscientious consumers, ethical engineers, creative problem solvers, and informed advocates for resp…

Emotional wellbeing is an important indicator of overall health and poor emotional wellbeing can equally adversely affect one's overal…

Our work aims to advance the socially intelligent behavior of social embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents in real-world social inte…

Recognizing and interpreting group behaviors is much more challenging than that of individual behaviors. Firstly, the system must perform w…

When people listen to stories, the words are colored with emotions conveyed through prosodic features beyond the text alone. Visual font d…

The most meaningful connections between people are often formed through expression of shared vulnerability and emotional experiences. Despi…

Today's children will live in a world saturated with artificial intelligence. Understanding the key idea behind the functioning of intellig…

An essential element of K-12 AI literacy is educating learners about the ethical and societal implications of AI systems. Previous work in …

With the emergence of social robots in people’s daily lives, their interactions with people need to consider not only engaging with in…

Research OverviewAs artificial intelligence (AI) devices become more common in our homes, concerns about their potential harm to human-huma…

Technologies designed with personalities and social interfaces are entering our homes in the form of social robots such as Jibo and Cozmo. …

Audio-visual data set containing around 21.6 hours of parent-child interaction during story reading.The DAMI-P2C dataset consists of audio-…

Increasingly, devices designed with artificial intelligence (AI), such as robots or smart speakers, are entering people’s homes, workspaces…

​We take as a starting point for our work the recent scholarship by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, in which she described design jus…

Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are grappling with some herculean questions regarding kids' safety online. Homemade slime…

Social robots equipped with AI and designed with users’ social, emotional, and relational interactions in mind are increasingly being highl…

Doodlebot is a robot-based creative AI learning platform for high school students. It consists of an introduction to robotics, hardware, so…

Families with ASD often struggle with social and emotional communication. This work explores the role of an embodied agent (a social robot)…

As the presence of artificial intelligence expands significantly in children’s lives of learning and play, it is critical that students lea…

Children’s creativity—the ability to come up with novel, surprising, and valuable ideas—has been known to contribute to their learning outc…

Tega is a new robot platform designed to support long-term, in-home interactions with children, with applications in early-literacy educati…

How to Train Your Robot is a curriculum for students in 5-8th grade to explore artificial intelligence and ethics. In this course, students…

How do we raise conscientious consumers and designers of AI?Children today live in the age of artificial intelligence. On average, US child…

InspirationSleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a thir…

Voice-user interfaces (VUIs), such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, are increasingly becoming present in domestic environments. Us…

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents in an embodied form, such as Jibo, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home, are increasingly becoming part of our…

Embodied voice-based agents, such as Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, and Jibo, are becoming increasingly present in the home environment. For m…

The Jibo Research Platform is an in-the-field deployable Social Robotics experimentation and data collection infrastructure. Built upon the…

Text-to-Motion generates a sequence of contingent robot animations to accompany the sentiment analyzed from an input sentence and its spoke…

Cognimates is a platform where parents and children (7-10 years old) participate in creative programming activities in which they lea…

Realtime detection of social cues in children’s voicesIn everyday conversation, people use what are known as backchannels to signal to some…

Social robots are increasingly being developed for long-term interactions with children in domains such as healthcare, education, therapy, …

Most countries are projected to see the number of people ages 65 and older surpass the population under the age of 15 by 2050. The limitati…

Early literacy plays an important role in a child's future. However, the reality is that over 57 million children have no access to a schoo…

Understanding social-emotional behaviors in storytelling interactions plays a critical role in the development of interactive and education…

Could a social robot collaboratively exchange stories with children as a peer and help improve their linguistic and storytelling skills? We…

Young Learner's Companion Developing robots' growth mindset and pro-curious behavior and fostering the same in young learners via long…

My name is Raechel Walker. I'm a PhD student in the Personal Robots group. Here is a short description of my Data Activism Program:The Data…