
Leila TakayamaGoogle Inc. | Google
Leila Takayama
Stanford University, PhD (2008)
About
95
Publications
56,928
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
5,349
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
Position
- Research Scientist and Manager
Publications
Publications (95)
In a controlled lab experiment, we compared how in-person and robot-mediated communicative settings affected attitudes towards communicators and discourse phenomena related to conversational negotiation. We used a mock interview within-participants experiment design where each participant (mock interviewee) experienced both types of communication w...
Robots are being taught by increasingly broader populations of people who provide training data for machine learning algorithms. Many studies over the past decade have begun demonstrating reproducible robot teaching methodologies and have highlighted benefits in human-robot interaction (HRI). However, there have been few investigations about what i...
Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are essential to human-operated underwater expeditions in the deep sea. However, piloting an ROV to safely interact with live ecosystems is an expensive and cognitively demanding task, requiring extensive maneuvering and situational awareness. Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) could addres...
Although prior work has investigated children's judgments of robots' animacy, we take a sociocultural perspective to extend this research by exploring how families' interactions with a robot and parents' STEM background relate to children's understanding of robots. We explored the social context of parent–child goal‐directed play with an educationa...
Robots deployed in human-populated spaces often need human help to effectively complete their tasks. Yet, a robot that asks for help too frequently or at the wrong times may cause annoyance, and a robot that asks too infrequently may be unable to complete its tasks. In this paper, we present a model of humans' helpfulness towards a robot in an offi...
Travel restrictions and social distancing measures make it difficult to observe, monitor or manage physical fieldwork. We describe research in progress that applies technologies for real-time remote observation and conversation in on-road vehicles to observe field work on a farm. We collaborated on a pilot deployment of this project at Kreher Eggs...
We compared psychological distance in a mock job interview that was conducted either in-person or via mobile telepresence. In the mobile telepresence setting, the interviewers communicated through a telepresence robot. In one of the first explorations of how mobile telepresence affected psychological distance, we analyzed use of pronouns that sugge...
Telepresence robots act as the remote embodiments of human operators, enabling people to stay connected to friends, family, and
coworkers over lengthy physical separations. However, the factors
affecting how humans can best make use of such systems are not
yet well understood. This paper explores the effects of personalization and relationship clos...
Telepresence robots can empower people to work, play, and learn along with others, despite geographic distance. To investigate the use of telepresence robots for remote attendance of university-level classes, we conducted a study in four courses at our university. We compared student experiences attending class during three distinct phases in three...
There is sustained and growing interest in human-robot teaming across academia and industry. Many critical questions still remain as to how to foster flexible, effective, teaming that allow humans and robots to work closely together. This panel will bring together experts on human-robot interaction (HRI) across academia and industry to discuss and...
Telepresence robots hold the potential to allow absent students to remain physically embodied and socially connected in the classroom. In this work, we investigate the effects of telepresence robot personalization on K-12 students» perceptions of the robot, perceptions of themselves, and feelings of self-presence. We conducted a between-subjects, 2...
In face-to-face interaction, moving with and mimicking the body movements of communication partners has been widely demonstrated to affect interpersonal processes, including feel- ings of affiliation and closeness. In this paper, we examine effects of movement and mimicry in robot-mediated communication. Participants were instructed to get to know...
Service robots, such as the Savioke Relay, are becoming available in human environments such as hotels. It is important for these robots to not only be functional, but also to have appropriate socially interactive behaviors. In this paper, we first present results from a formative study with service industry customers. A key demand we discover is t...
Robots are increasingly becoming a real presence in our lives. From self-driving cars to autonomous drones to assistance robots, what is the state of the robot technology? How good IS our human-robot communication? How will robots (in many forms) become partners in our lives and in our work. This panel brings together robot practitioners (and sever...
As network availability becomes ubiquitous, users are leveraging this access to establish their presence in remote locations through the use of commercially available telepresence technologies. With the increasing adoption of systems, new questions are emerging about how these technologies affect user interactions and relationships. Our goal for th...
Robotic telepresence systems-videoconferencing systems that allow a remote user to drive around in another location-are an emerging technology for supporting geographically-distributed teams. Thus far, many of these systems rely on affordances designed for stationary systems, such as a single, narrow-view camera to provide vision for the remote use...
Existing approaches to Robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD) require multiple demonstrations to capture task information that lets robots generalize to unseen situations. However, providing these demonstrations is cumbersome for end-users. In addition, users who are not familiar with the system often fail to demonstrate sufficiently varied demon...
Robotic telepresence systems—videoconferencing systems that allow a remote user to drive around in another location— provide an alternative to video-mediated communications as a way of interacting over distances. These systems, which are seeing increasing use in business and medical settings, are unique in their ability to grant the remote user the...
Learning from demonstration utilizes human expertise to program a robot. We believe this approach to robot programming will facilitate the development and deployment of general purpose personal robots that can adapt to specific user pref-erences. Demonstrations can potentially take place across a wide variety of environ-mental conditions. In this p...
Communication technologies are becoming increasingly diverse in form and functionality, making it important to identify which aspects of these technologies actually improve geographically distributed communication. Our study examines two potentially important aspects of communication technologies which appear in robot-mediated communication - physi...
A large body of research in human communication has shown that a person's height plays a key role in how persuasive, attractive, and dominant others judge the person to be. Robotic telepresence systems - systems that combine video-conferencing capabilities with robotic navigation to allow geographically dispersed people to maneuver in remote locati...
Assistive mobile manipulators (AMMs) have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing with their families.
The Robots for Humanity project aims to enable people with severe motor impairments to interact with their own bodies and their environment through the use of an assistive mobile manipulator, thereby improving their quality of life. Assistive mobile manipulators (AMMs) are mobile robots that physically manipulate the world in order to provide assis...
Home and automation are not natural partners--one homey and the other cold. Most current automation in the home is packaged in the form of appliances. To better understand the current reality and possible future of living with other types of domestic technology, we went out into the field to conduct need finding interviews among people who have alr...
As an emerging technology that enables geographically distributed work teams, mobile remote presence (MRP) systems present new opportunities for supporting effective team building and collaboration. MRP systems are physically embodied mobile videoconferencing systems that remote co-workers control. These systems allow remote users, pilots, to activ...
Technologists have long wanted to put robots in the home, making robots truly personal and present in every aspect of our lives. It has not been clear, however, exactly what these robots should do in the home. The difficulty of tasking robots with home chores comes not only from the significant technical challenges, but also from the strong emotion...
This year's human-robot interaction (HRI) conference focuses on "robots in the loop" and how robots are capable of enhancing the experiences of human users in everyday life and work. Telepresence robots allow operators the ability to participate in remote locations through their mobility and live bidirectional audio and video feeds. Using robotic t...
Human-in-the loop robotic systems have the potential to handle complex tasks in unstructured environments, by combining the cognitive skills of a human operator with autonomous tools and behaviors. Along these lines, we present a system for remote human-in-the-loop grasp execution. An operator uses a computer interface to visualize a physical robot...
Metaphors for making sense of new communication technologies are important for setting user expectations about appropriate use of the technologies. When users do not share a common metaphorical model for using these technologies, interpersonal communication breakdowns can occur. Through a set of three 8-week-long field deployments and one ongoing o...
A major challenge facing human-robot interaction is un-derstanding how to people will interact and cope with increasingly agentic objects in their everyday lives. As more robotic technolo-gies enter human environments, it is critical to consider other mod-els of human-robot interaction that do not always require focused attention from people. Ubiqu...
In our field deployments of mobile remote presence (MRP) systems in offices, we observed that remote operators of MRPs often unintentionally spoke too loudly. This disrupted their local co-workers, who happened to be within earshot of the MRP system. To address this issue, we prototyped and empirically evaluated the effect of sidetone to help opera...
This study builds upon previous work regarding people's attitudes toward robot workers, identifying the characteristics of occupations for which people believe robots are qualified and desired. This research updates prior research and adds a new dimension of respondent expertise in the domain of robotics (N=392, which includes 134 robotics experts...
As geographically distributed teams become increasingly common, there are more pressing demands for communication work practices and technologies that support distributed collaboration. One set of technologies that are emerging on the commercial market is mobile remote presence (MRP) systems, physically embodied videoconferencing systems that remot...
As mobile remote presence (MRP) systems become more pervasive in everyday environments such as office spaces, it is important for operators to navigate through remote locations without running into obstacles. Human-populated environments frequently change (e.g., doors open and close, furniture is moved around) and mobile remote presence systems mus...
A system for tracking driver facial features aims to enhance the predictive accuracy of driver-assistance systems. The authors identify key facial features at varying pre-accident intervals and use them to predict minor and major accidents.
The animation techniques of anticipation and reaction can help create robot behaviors that are human readable such that people can figure out what the robot is doing, reasonably predict what the robot will do next, and ultimately interact with the robot in an effective way. By showing forethought before action and expressing a reaction to the task...
While much of human-robot interaction research focuses upon people interacting with autonomous robots, there is also much to be gained from exploring human interpersonal interaction through robots. The current study focuses on mobile remote presence (MRP) systems as used by a population who could potentially benefit from more social connectivity an...
Inexpensive personal robots will soon become available to a large portion of the population. Currently, most consumer robots are relatively simple single-purpose machines or toys. In order to be cost effective and thus widely accepted, robots will need to be able to accomplish a wide range of tasks in diverse conditions. Learning these tasks from d...
One critical question suggested by Web 2.0 is as follows: When is it better to leverage the knowledge of other users vs. rely on the product characteristic-based metrics for online product recommenders? Three recent and notable changes of recommender systems have been as follows: (1) a shift from characteristic-based recommendation algorithms to so...
Managing user expectations of personal robots becomes particularly challenging when the end-user just wants to know what the robot can do, and neither understands nor cares about its technical specifications. In describing what a robot can do to such an end-user, we explored the questions of (a) whether or not such users would respond to expectatio...
Bottleneck between robots and people presents an enormous challenge to the human-robot interaction community. So in addition to robot object learning, task learning, and natural language understanding, this paper proposes designing interfaces that make up for low communication bandwidth by thoughtfully accounting for the constrained capabilities of...
Human-Robot Interaction researchers are beginning to reach out to fields not traditionally associated with interaction research, such as the performing arts, cartooning, and animation. These collaborations offer the potential for novel insights about how to get robots and people to interact more effectively, but they also involve a number of unique...
Communication mediating technologies are throwing our voices away from our bodies in situations ranging from voice conference meetings to mass presentations. Physical height is known to influence dominance in interactions between people (1, 8, 13, 16). This study explores how audio projection technologies also influence dominance behaviors between...
Managing user expectations of personal robots becomes particularly challenging when the end-user just wants to know what the robot can do, and neither understands nor cares about its technical specifications. In describing what a robot can do to such an end-user, we explored the questions of (a) whether or not such users would respond to expectatio...
Human-Robot Interaction researchers are beginning to reach out to fields not traditionally associated with interaction research, such as the performing arts, cartooning, and animation. These collaborations offer the potential for novel insights about how to get robots and people to interact more effectively, but they also involve a number of unique...
As robots enter the everyday physical world of people, it is important that they abide by society's unspoken social rules such as respecting people's personal spaces. In this paper, we explore issues related to human personal space around robots, beginning with a review of the existing literature in human-robot interaction regarding the dimensions...
Automatic doors exemplify the challenges of designing emotionally welcoming interactive systems-a critical issue in the design of any system of incidental use. We attempt to broaden the automatic door's repertoire of signals by examining how people respond to a variety of "door gestures" designed to offer different levels of approachability. In a p...
As computational agents become more sophisticated, it will frequently be necessary for the agents to disagree with users. In these cases, it might be useful for the agent to use politeness strategies that defuse the person's frustrations and preserve the human-computer relationship. One such strategy is distancing, which we implemented by spatially...
Psychologically preparing for upcoming events can be a difficult task, particularly when switching social contexts, e.g., from office work to a family event. To help with such transitions, the audio priming system uses pre-recorded audio messages to psychologically prepare a person for an upcoming event. In this system, audio priming is being used...
Though legislation is increasingly discouraging drivers from holding on to their mobile phones while talking, hands-free devices do not improve driver safety. We offer two design alternatives to improve driver safety in the contexts of voice-based user interfaces and mobile phone conversations in cars' side tones (auditory feedback used in landline...
Advances in mobile phones and cellular network capabilities have enabled many opportunities for information access on the move. These capabilities provide instant access for the mobile user, but have exacerbated the problem of interaction in a mobile context. Mobile users are often engaged in another task that makes it difficult for them to filter...
Agentic objects are those entities that are perceived and responded to in-the-moment as if they were agentic despite the likely reflective perception that they are not agentic at all. They include autonomous robots, but also simpler systems like automatic doors, trashcans, and staplers--anything that seems to possess agency. It is well known that l...
As robots become more pervasive, operators will develop richer relationships with them. In a 2 (robot form: humanoid vs. car) x 2 (assembler: self vs. other) between-participants experiment (N=56), participants assembled either a humanoid or car robot. Participants then used, in the context of a game, either the robot they built or a different robo...
Drawing from lessons learned in the combination of sciences and engineering in the field of human-computer interaction, this paper presents a set of issues relating to improving the scientific rigor of experiments in robotics, moving toward a sciences of robotics. It highlights the strengths of a variable-based approach to the study of technologies...
As they are for everyday people, the many extant forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC) are potentially overwhelming to re- searchers and designers. To make sense of the broad variety of current communication technologies and practices and to support generating new forms of communication, we use a dimensional, morphological analysis to dev...
This study investigated the possibility of using interactive media to help drowsy drivers wake up, thereby enabling them to drive more safely.
Many studies have investigated the negative impacts of driver drowsiness and distraction in cars, separately. However, none has studied the potentially positive effects of slightly interactive media for rous...
We present a study of people's attitudes toward robot workers, identifying the characteristics of occupations for which people believe robots are qualified and desired. We deployed a web-based public-opinion survey that asked respondents (n=250) about their attitudes regarding robots' suitability for a variety of jobs (n=812) from the U.S. Departme...
Cars have changed from pure transportation devices to fully interactive, voice-based systems. While voice interaction in the car has previously required on-board processing, the growing speed and ubiquity of wireless technologies now enable interaction with a distant source. Will the perceived source of the information influence driver safety, resp...
Advances in mobile communication technologies have allowed people in more places to reach each other more conveniently than ever before. However, many mobile phone communications occur in inappropriate contexts, disturbing others in close proximity, invading personal and corporate privacy, and more broadly breaking social norms. This paper presents...
Our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world. This paper draws on theories of embodiment — from psychology, sociology, and philosophy — synthesizing five themes we believe are particularly salient for interaction design: thinking through doing, performanc...
In this thriving world of mobile communications, the difficulty of communication is no longer contacting someone (the receiver), but rather con- tacting them in a socially appropriate manner. Ideally, senders should have some understanding of a receiver's availability in order to make contact at the right time, in the right contexts, and with the o...
System administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. While Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are being offered as system administration tools, they mostly continue to use Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs). Ba...
This study examines whether characteristics of a car voice can affect driver performance and affect. In a 2 (driver emotion: happy or upset) x 2 (car voice emotion: energetic vs. subdued) experimental study, participants (N=40) had emotion induced through watching one of two sets of 5-minute video clips. Participants then spent 20 minutes in a driv...
It is a desirable goal to balance information given to the user with the potential adverse effects on cognitive processing and perception of information systems. In this experiment, we investigated the minimum level of information accuracy necessary in an in-car information system to elicit positive behavioral and attitudinal responses from the dri...
Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a ser...
In this paper, we demonstrate how field studies, interviews, and low-fidelity prototypes can be used to inform the design of ubiquitous computing systems for firefighters. We describe the artifacts and processes used by firefighters to assess, plan, and communicate during emergency situations, showing how accountability affects these decisions, how...