Bilge Mutlu

• PhD, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009
• Professor (Full) at University of Wisconsin–Madison

AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to support their children's learning. We designed a card-based kit, SET, to systematically capture scenarios that...

Applications of Generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, have gained popularity among the public due to their ease of access, use, and support of educational and creative activities. Despite these benefits, GenAI poses unique risks for families, such as lacking sufficient safeguards tailored to protect children under 16 years of age and not offering...

Objective This Emerging Ideas report explores families' (parents and their children) uses and gratification for ChatGPT. Background Generative artificial intelligence–based conversational agents, such as ChatGPT, can be used to accomplish a variety of tasks, yet little is known about how and why parents and their children may use these technologie...

With the increasing prevalence of online learning, adapting education to diverse learner needs remains a persistent challenge. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), promise powerful tools and capabilities to enhance personalized learning in online educational environments. In this work, we e...

Intergenerational co-creation using technology between grandparents and grandchildren can be challenging due to differences in technological familiarity. AI has emerged as a promising tool to support co-creative activities, offering flexibility and creative assistance, but its role in facilitating intergenerational connection remains underexplored....

Automated planning is traditionally the domain of experts, utilized in fields like manufacturing and healthcare with the aid of expert planning tools. Recent advancements in LLMs have made planning more accessible to everyday users due to their potential to assist users with complex planning tasks. However, LLMs face several application challenges...

AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to support their children's learning. We designed a card-based kit, SET, to systematically capture scenarios that...

Robots, particularly in service and companionship roles, must develop positive relationships with people they interact with regularly to be successful. These positive human-robot relationships can be characterized as establishing "rapport," which indicates mutual understanding and interpersonal connection that form the groundwork for successful lon...

As interest in studying in-the-wild human-robot interaction grows, there is a need for methods to collect data over time and in naturalistic or potentially private environments. HRI researchers have increasingly used the diary method for these studies, asking study participants to self-administer a structured data collection instrument, i.e., a dia...

People feel attached to places that are meaningful to them, which psychological research calls "place attachment." Place attachment is associated with self-identity, self-continuity, and psychological well-being. Even small cues, including videos, images, sounds, and scents, can facilitate feelings of connection and belonging to a place. Telepresen...

People routinely use facial expressions to communicate successfully and to regulate other's behaviour, yet modelling the form and meaning of these facial behaviours has proven surprisingly complex. One reason for this difficulty may lie in an over-reliance on the assumptions inherent in existing theories of facial expression - specifically that (1)...

Leveraging generative AI (for example, Large Language Models) for language understanding within robotics opens up possibilities for LLM-driven robot end-user development (EUD). Despite the numerous design opportunities it provides, little is understood about how this technology can be utilized when constructing robot program logic. In this paper, w...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause a range of cognitive and communication challenges that negatively affect social participation in both face-to-face interactions and computer-mediated communication. In particular, individuals with TBI report barriers that limit access to participation on social media platforms. To improve access to and use of...

Objective Physical and cognitive workloads and performance were studied for a corrective shared control (CSC) human–robot collaborative (HRC) sanding task. Background Manual sanding is physically demanding. Collaborative robots (cobots) can potentially reduce physical stress, but fully autonomous implementation has been particularly challenging du...

Despite advances in areas such as the personalization of robots, sustaining adoption of robots for long-term use in families remains a challenge. Recent studies have identified integrating robots into families' routines and rituals as a promising approach to support long-term adoption. However, few studies explored the integration of robots into fa...

Novel end-user programming (EUP) tools enable on-the-fly (i.e., spontaneous, easy, and rapid) creation of interactions with robotic systems. These tools are expected to empower users in determining system behavior, although very little is understood about how end users perceive, experience, and use these systems. In this paper, we seek to address t...

Traditional approaches to human-robot interaction design typically examine robot behaviors in controlled environments and narrow tasks. These methods are impractical for designing robots that interact with diverse user groups in complex human environments. Drawing from the field of theater, we present the construct of scenes -- individual environme...

Robots in real-world environments continuously engage with multiple users and encounter changes that lead to unexpected conflicts in fulfilling user requests. Recent technical advancements (e.g., large-language models (LLMs), program synthesis) offer various methods for automatically generating repair plans that address such conflicts. In this work...

Increasing evidence suggests that many deployed AI systems do not sufficiently support end-user interaction and information needs. Engaging end-users in the design of these systems can reveal user needs and expectations, yet effective ways of engaging end-users in the AI explanation design remain under-explored. To address this gap, we developed a...

In this paper, we explore the design and use of conversational telepresence robots to help homebound older adults interact with the external world. An initial needfinding study (N=8) using video vignettes revealed older adults' experiential needs for robot-mediated remote experiences such as exploration, reminiscence and social participation. We th...

Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children's learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot...

Drawing on the social compensation hypothesis, this study investigates whether Facebook use facilitates social connectedness for individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), a common and debilitating medical condition that often results in social isolation. In a survey (N = 104 participants; n = 53 with TBI, n = 51 without TBI), individuals with...

We argue for the use of Petri nets as a modeling language for the iterative development process of interactive robotic systems. Petri nets, particularly Timed Colored Petri nets (TCPNs), have the potential to unify various phases of the development process-design, specification, simulation, validation, implementation, and deployment. We additionall...

Shared autonomy methods, where a human operator and a robot arm work together, have enabled robots to complete a range of complex and highly variable tasks. Existing work primarily focuses on one human sharing autonomy with a single robot. By contrast, in this paper we present an approach for multi-robot shared autonomy that enables one operato...

Robots can help reduce physical stress in manual sanding, but implementation has been challenging due to the skill required, task variability, and robot limitations. In shared control (SC) a robot operates semi-autonomously while the human provides real-time corrections. A laboratory study tested the effectiveness of SC for removing paint using an...

We investigate how robotic camera systems can offer new capabilities to computer-supported cooperative work through the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype system called Periscope. With Periscope, a local worker completes manipulation tasks with guidance from a remote helper who observes the workspace through a camera mounted on a se...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause cognitive, communication, and psychological challenges that profoundly limit independence in everyday life. Conversational Agents (CAs) can provide individuals with TBI with cognitive and communication support, although little is known about how they make use of CAs to address injury-related needs. In this stu...

Impaired facial affect recognition is common after traumatic brain injury (TBI) and linked to poor social outcomes. We explored whether perception of emotions depicted by emoji is also impaired after TBI. Fifty participants with TBI and 50 non-injured peers generated free-text labels to describe emotions depicted by emoji and rated their levels of...

Introduction Several studies have reported impaired emotion recognition in adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), but studies have two major design features that limit application of results to real-world contexts: (1) participants choose from among lists of basic emotions, rather than generating emotion labels, and (2) images are typically pres...

Handheld kinesthetic haptic interfaces can provide greater mobility and richer tactile information as compared to traditional grounded devices. In this paper, we introduce a new handheld haptic interface which takes input using bidirectional coupled finger flexion. We present the device design motivation and design details and experimentally evalua...

We investigate how robotic camera systems can offer new capabilities to computer-supported cooperative work through the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype system called Periscope. With Periscope, a local worker completes manipulation tasks with guidance from a remote helper who observes the workspace through a camera mounted on a se...

Transactive Memory System (TMS) is a group theory that describes how communication can enable the combination of individual minds into a group. While this theory has been extensively studied in human-human groups, it has not yet been formally applied to socially assistive robot design. We demonstrate how the three-phase TMS group communication proc...

Shared autonomy methods, where a human operator and a robot arm work together, have enabled robots to complete a range of complex and highly variable tasks. Existing work primarily focuses on one human sharing autonomy with a single robot. By contrast, in this paper we present an approach for multi-robot shared autonomy that enables one operator to...

Social robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in the real world. Unsupervised user interactions in a natural and familiar setting, such as the home, can reveal novel design insights and opportunities. This paper presents an analysis and key design insights from family-robot interactions, captured via on-robot recordings during an unsupervised f...

Robots designed to interact with people in collaborative or social scenarios must move in ways that are consistent with the robot's task and communication goals. However, combining these goals in a naïve manner can result in mutually exclusive solutions, or infeasible or problematic states and actions. In this paper, we present Lively, a framework...

Background: Facial emotion recognition deficits are common after moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and linked to poor social outcomes. We examine whether emotion recognition deficits extend to facial expressions depicted by emoji. Methods: Fifty-one individuals with moderate-severe TBI (25 female) and fifty-one neurotypical peers (26...

Service robots for personal use in the home and the workplace require end-user development solutions for swiftly scripting robot tasks as the need arises. Many existing solutions preserve ease, efficiency, and convenience through simple programming interfaces or by restricting task complexity. Others facilitate meticulous task design but often do s...

We present a participatory design method to design human-robot interactions with older adults and its application through a case study of designing an assistive robot for a senior living facility. The method, called Situated Participatory Design (sPD), was designed considering the challenges of working with older adults and involves three phases th...

Advancements in affective science and robotics have allowed researchers to consider how robots can express emotions appropriately in human- robot interaction. Borrowing previous work from the- ories of nonverbal expressions of emotion, we de- signed 24 distinct emotional expressions for a reading companion robot–Misty II. We validated the expres- s...

Background Adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) report significant barriers to using current social media platforms, including cognitive overload and challenges in interpreting social cues. Rehabilitation providers may be tasked with helping to address these barriers. Objectives To develop technological supports to increase social media access...

Drones can provide a minimally-constrained adapting camera view to support robot telemanipulation. Furthermore, the drone view can be automated to reduce the burden on the operator during teleoperation. However, existing approaches do not focus on two important aspects of using a drone as an automated view provider. The first is how the drone shoul...

While a growing number of machine learning (ML) systems have been deployed in clinical settings with the promise of improving patient care, many have struggled to gain adoption and realize this promise. Based on a qualitative analysis of coded interviews with clinicians who use an ML-based system for sepsis, we found that, rather than viewing the s...

Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better understand and explore the design space of caretaking activities with 10 children, aged 8-12 from eight families, invol...

Conference talk recording for IDC22 conference

Conference talk recording for IDC22 conference

Robots hold significant promise to assist with providing care to an aging population and to help overcome increasing caregiver demands. Although a large body of research has explored robotic assistance for individuals with disabilities and age-related challenges, this past work focuses primarily on building robotic capabilities for assistance and h...

Background A critical gap in our knowledge about social media is whether we can alleviate accessibility barriers and challenges for individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), to improve their social participation and health. To do this, we need real-time information about these barriers and challenges, to design appropriate aids. Objective The...

Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better understand and explore the design space of caretaking activities with 10 children, aged 8--12 from eight families, invo...

Robots hold significant promise to assist with providing care to an aging population and to help overcome increasing caregiver demands. Although a large body of research has explored robotic assistance for individuals with disabilities and age-related challenges, this past work focuses primarily on building robotic capabilities for assistance and h...

Social robots are emerging as learning companions for children, and research shows that they facilitate the development of interest and learning even through brief interactions. However, little is known about how such technologies might support these goals in authentic environments over long-term periods of use and interaction. We designed a learni...

Objective: The effect of camera viewpoint was studied when performing visually obstructed psychomotor targeting tasks. Background: Previous research in laparoscopy and robotic teleoperation found that complex perceptual-motor adaptations associated with misaligned viewpoints corresponded to degraded performance in manipulation. Because optimal c...

Background Voice-controlled smart speakers and displays have a unique but unproven potential for delivering eHealth interventions. Many laptop- and smartphone-based interventions have been shown to improve multiple outcomes, but voice-controlled platforms have not been tested in large-scale rigorous trials. Older adults with multiple chronic health...

Objective: The effect of camera viewpoint was studied when performing visually obstructed psychomotor targeting tasks. Background: Previous research in laparoscopy and robotic teleoperation found that complex perceptual-motor adaptations associated with misaligned viewpoints corresponded to degraded performance in manipulation. Because optimal came...

Cooperating with another person requires communicating intentions and coordinating behavior. People often accomplish these tasks using spoken language, but verbal communication is not always available. Here, we test the hypothesis that, to establish successful cooperative interaction, people compensate for the temporary loss of one means, verbal co...

Conversational interfaces increasingly rely on human-like dialogue to offer a natural experience. However, relying on dialogue involving multiple exchanges for even simple tasks can overburden users, particularly older adults. In this paper, we explored the use of politeness theory in conversation design to alleviate this burden and improve user ex...

Cooperating with another person requires communicating intentions and coordinating behavior. People often accomplish these tasks using spoken language, but verbal communication is not always available. Here, we test the hypothesis that, to establish successful cooperative interaction, people compensate for the temporary loss of one means, verbal co...

Remotely programming robots to execute tasks often relies on registering objects of interest in the robot's environment. Frequently, these tasks involve articulating objects such as opening or closing a valve. However, existing human-in-the-loop methods for registering objects do not consider articulations and the corresponding impact to the geomet...

Objective Trade-offs between productivity, physical workload (PWL), and mental workload (MWL) were studied when integrating collaborative robots (cobots) into existing manual work by optimizing the allocation of tasks. Background As cobots become more widely introduced in the workplace and their capabilities greatly improved, there is a need to co...

The introduction of collaborative robots (cobots) into the workplace has presented both opportunities and challenges for those seeking to utilize their functionality. Prior research has shown that despite the capabilities afforded by cobots, there is a disconnect between those capabilities and the applications that they currently are deployed in, p...

BACKGROUND Voice-controlled smart speakers and displays have unique but unproven potential for delivering eHealth interventions. Many laptop- and smartphone-based interventions have been shown to improve multiple outcomes, but voice-controlled platforms have not been tested in large-scale, rigorous trials. Older adults with multiple chronic health...