Sara Kiesler

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Taking an action research approach, we engaged in fieldwork with school-based behavioral health care teams to: observe record keeping practices, design and deploy a prototype system addressing key challenges, and reflect on its use. We describe the challenges of capturing behavioral data using both paper and electronic records. Creating records of...

The tendency to believe and act on others' misinformation is documented in much prior work. This paper focuses on inaccuracy blindness, the tendency to take a collaborator's poor information at face value, which reduces problem-solving success. We draw on social psychological research from the 1970s showing that evaluative rating scales can prompt...

When health services involve long-term treatment over months or years, providers have the ability, not present in acute emergency care, to collaboratively reflect on clients’ changing health data and adjust interventions. In this paper, we discuss temporality as a factor in the design of health information technology. We define a temporal spectru...

Animated characters are expected to fulfill a variety of social roles across different domains. To be successful and effective, these characters must display a wide range of personalities. Designers and animators create characters with appropriate personalities by using their intuition and artistic expertise. Our goal is to provide evidence-based p...

Current approaches to personalization either presuppose people's needs and automatically tailor services or provide formulaic options for people to customize. We propose a complementary approach to personalization: a reflective strategy that helps people realize what matters to them and enables them to better personalize services themselves. To des...

Research indicates that the facial expressions of animated characters and agents can influence people's perceptions and interactions with these entities. We designed an experiment to examine how an interactive animated avatar's facial expressiveness influences dyadic conversations between adults and the avatar. We animated the avatar in realtime us...

Increasingly, the advice people receive on the Internet is socially transparent in the sense that it displays contextual information about the advice-givers or their actions. We hypothesize that activity transparency -seeing an advice giver's process while creating his or her recommendations - will increase advice taking. We report three experiment...

Dramatic changes in the practice of scientific research over the past half century, including trends towards working in teams and on large projects, as well as geographically distributed and interdisciplinary collaboration, have created opportunities and challenges for scientists. Some of the newer ways of doing science create opportunities and cha...

Animated characters appear in applications for entertainment, education, and therapy. When these characters display appropriate emotions for their context, they can be particularly effective. Characters can display emotions by accurately mimicking the facial expressions and vocal cues that people display or by damping or exaggerating the emotionali...

Motivated by limitations in today's host-centric IP network, recent studies have proposed clean-slate network architectures centered around alternate first-class principals, such as content, services, or users. However, muchlike the host-centric IP design, elevating one principal type above others hinders communication between other principals and...

Various mechanisms exist to secure users' passwords, yet users continue to struggle with the complexity of multiple password management. We explore the effectiveness of a feedback loop to improve users' password management. We introduce YourPassword, a web-based application that uses feedback to inform users about the security of their password beh...

Various mechanisms exist to secure users' passwords, yet users continue to struggle with the complexity of multiple password management. We explore the effectiveness of a feedback loop to improve users' password management. We introduce YourPassword, a web-based application that uses feedback to inform users about the security of their password beh...

Interactive animated characters have the potential to engage and educate children, but there is little research on children's interactions with animated characters and real people. We conducted an experiment with 69 children between the ages of 4 and 10 years to investigate how they might engage in conversation differently if their interactive part...

Physical therapists could make better treatment decisions if they had accurate patient home exercise data but today this information is only available from patient self-report. A more accurate source of data could be gained from wearable computing designed for physical therapy exercise support. Existing systems have been tested in the lab but we ha...

In the physical therapy setting, physical therapists (PTs) often prescribe exercises for their clients to perform at home. However, it is difficult for PTs to obtain information about their clients' compliance with the prescribed exercises, the quality of performance and symptom magnitude. We present an iPod-based system for capturing this informat...

Asynchronous collaborative analysis is important in many fields, but information sharing can be a bottleneck. Tools for annotating, organizing, and summarizing information can help, but their value will likely depend on the accuracy of teammates' information. To document this claim, two experiments examined participants' performance on a complex de...

High turnover and under contribution are problems in many online communities, threatening their ability to provide resources for members and even their existence. This article describes two approaches for increasing attachment to online communities inspired by social psychological theory. With identity-based attachment, members feel connected to th...

Autism education programs for children collect and use large amounts of behavioral data on each student. Staff use paper almost exclusively to collect these data, despite significant problems they face in tracking student data in situ, filling out data sheets and graphs on a daily basis, and using the sheets in collaborative decision making. We con...

In this research we set out to discover why and how people seek anonymity in their online interactions. Our goal is to inform policy and the design of future Internet architecture and applications. We interviewed 44 people from America, Asia, Europe, and Africa who had sought anonymity and asked them about their experiences. A key finding of our re...

Heterogeneous groups are valuable, but differences among members can weaken group identification. Weak group identification may be especially problematic in larger groups, which, in contrast with smaller groups, require more attention to motivating members and coordinating their tasks. We hypothesized that as groups increase in size, productivity w...

Common guidelines followed in the animation community include the idea that cartoon characters should be exaggerated to better convey emotion and intent, whereas more realistic characters should have “matching” realistic motion. We investigated the effects of rendering style and amount of facial motion on perceptions of character likeability, intel...

With advances in robotics, robots can give advice and help using natural language. The field of HRI, however, has not yet developed a communication strategy for giving advice effectively. Drawing on literature in politeness and informal speech, we propose options for a robot's help-giving speech-using hedges or discourse markers, both of which can...

Workers in microtask work environments such as Mechanical Turk typically do not know if or how they fit into a workflow. The research question we posed here was whether displaying information about the number of other workers doing the same task would motivate better or poorer work quality. In experiment 1, we varied the information about co-worker...

Interdependent tasks in Mechanical Turk (MTurk) can be managed efficiently with a workflow, a sequence of tasks through which work passes to its completion. We ask if workers should be informed about the workflow, which we call workflow transparency. Transparency could motivate workers or induce social loafing. We describe three experiments to dete...

Recorded images of children's activities can be useful to caregivers and clinicians who need behavioral evidence to support children with autism. However, image capture systems for autism are typically complex and provide only a top-down, outsider's view. In this work, we assessed the use of cameras worn by children to record the context of their a...

Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important d...

When people fall and experience problems of balance, physical therapists (PTs) often prescribe home balance exercises involving repetitive head movements. Currently, patients' compliance and performance of these home exercises are invisible to PTs, who need the data to make informed decisions for treatment adjustments. We present an easy-to-use too...

Prior research has investigated the effect of interactive social agents presented on computer screens or embodied in robots. Much of this research has been pursued in labs and brief field studies. Comparatively little is known about social agents embedded in the workplace, where employees have repeated interactions with the agent, alone and with ot...

Visual telecommunication systems support natural interaction by allowing users to remotely interact with one another using natural speech and movement. Network connections and computation cause delays that may result in interactions that feel unnatural or belabored. In an experiment using an audiovisual telecommunications device, synchronized audio...

Creating and sustaining rapport between robots and people is critical for successful robotic services. As a first step towards this goal, we explored a personalization strategy with a snack delivery robot. We designed a social robotic snack delivery service, and, for half of the participants, personalized the service based on participants' service...

According to an old English saying, “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel. ” In online communities there’s some truth to this notion. A stalker, thief, troll, or impersonator can ruin the community experience for the majority of members who respect the intent of the site and the feelings of others. Misbehavior need not be illegal to be destructive...

An emerging Internet trend is greater social transparency, such as the use of real names in social networking sites, feeds of friends' activities, traces of others' re-use of content, and visualizations of team interactions. Researchers lack a systematic way to conceptualize and evaluate social transparency. The purpose of this paper is to develop...

Our study investigated the use of annotations in an asynchronous crime-solving task. In Study 1, regardless of whether they anticipated a partner, participants had better performance if they annotated more about connections across documents. In Study 2, annotations that pointed to more connections across documents improved the performance of the se...

Since the mid-1990s, teenagers have migrated from email and chat rooms to instant messaging (IM). We observed this change in data from 60 interviews with teens and their families conducted from 1996 to 2002 and a national survey of teenagers in 2002. We examined the content of conversations, communication partners, and conversation multitasking. Wh...

Summary Online communities depend upon a core of comm itted members who participate, contribute, and stick with the group. To encourage commitment, community design has to accommodate people's motivations for being in the community and unleash the social forces that cause people to feel attached to the community, to feel responsibility for the comm...

One of the central questions animating much social-science research on the social impact of new technology is the specific effect it has on social relationships. This chapter provides a quantitative literature review, a meta-analysis, of 16 empirical studies investigating the association of Internet use with measures of social activity. Collectivel...

Using longitudinal data, this chapter indicates that people who use the Internet most also show the largest decline in television viewing. However, this fall is not steepest among those who use the Internet for entertainment or information seeking, as the functional equivalence argument would imply. Rather, the largest drop in television viewing oc...

During the past decade, technology has become more pervasive, encroaching more and more on our lives. Computers, cell phones, and the internet have an enormous influence not only on how we function at work, but also on how we communicate and interact outside the office. Researchers have been documenting the effect that these types of technology hav...

Handing over objects to humans is an essential capability for assistive robots. While there are infinite ways to hand an object, robots should be able to choose the one that is best for the human. In this paper we focus on choosing the robot and object configuration at which the transfer of the object occurs, i.e. the hand-over configuration. We ad...

Dramatic changes in the practice of science over the past half a century, including trends towards working in teams and on large projects, and geographically distributed and interdisciplinar y collaboration, have created opportunities and challenges for scientists. We argue that these changes in science represent new organizational forms and ways o...

For robots to get integrated in daily tasks assisting humans, robot-human interactions will need to reach a level of fluency close to that of human-human interactions. In this paper we address the fluency of robot-human hand-overs. From an observational study with our robot HERB, we identify the key problems with a baseline hand-over action. We fin...

The CHI community has led efforts to support teamwork, but has neglected team disruption, as may occur if team members relocate to another institution. We studied moves in 548 interdisciplinary research projects with 2691 researchers (PIs). Moves, and thus disruptions, were not rare, especially in large distributed projects. Overall, one-third of a...

Influence through information and feedback has been one of the main approaches of persuasive technology. We propose another approach based on behavioral economics research on decision-making. This approach involves designing the presentation and timing of choices to encourage people to make self-beneficial decisions. We applied three behavioral eco...

People with chronic health problems use online resources to understand and manage their condition, but many such resources can present competing and confusing viewpoints. We surveyed and interviewed with people experiencing prolonged symptoms after a Lyme disease diagnosis. We explore how competing viewpoints in online content affect participants'...

Science policy across the world emphasizes the desirability of research teams that can integrate diverse perspectives and expertise into new knowledge, methods, and products. However, integration in research work is not well understood. Based on retrospective interviews with 55 researchers from 52 diverse research projects, we categorized teams as...

Previous research has shown that design features that support privacy are essential for new technologies looking to gain widespread adoption. As such, privacy-sensitive design will be important for the adoption of social robots, as they could introduce new types of privacy risks to users. In this paper, we report findings from our preliminary study...

One goal of assistive robotics is to design interactive robots that can help disabled people with tasks such as fetching objects. When people do this task, they coordinate their movements closely with receivers. We investigated how a robot should fetch and give household objects to a person. To develop a model for the robot, we first studied traine...

Scheduling surgeries in hospitals is one of the most challenging activities for surgical staff. Schedule changes occur as often as every few moments, affecting necessary coordination of tasks, resources, and people within and across staff groups, and the stress people feel. In prior fieldwork at four sites, we observed that the physical layout of h...

To accommodate frequent emergencies, interruptions, and delays, hospital staff continually make and coordinate changes to the surgery schedule. The technical and social aspects of coordination in surgical suites have been described by prior studies. This paper addresses an understudied aspect of coordination: the physical environment. Based on a fi...

Disasters are threatening and highly dynamic situations, marked by high levels of information need and low levels of information availability. Advances in communication technologies have given people more ways to seek information and communicate—a redundancy that can help people cope with disaster situations and support subsequent recovery. This ar...

The rapid expansion of the Internet has increased the ease with which the public can obtain medical information. Most research on the utility of the Internet for health purposes has evaluated the quality of the information itself or examined its impact on clinical populations. Little is known about the consequences of its use by the general populat...

Robots that operate in the real world will make mistakes. Thus, those who design and build systems will need to understand how best to provide ways for robots to mitigate those mistakes. Building on diverse research literatures, we consider how to mitigate breakdowns in services provided by robots. Expectancy-setting strategies forewarn people of a...

In a world of widespread information access, information can overwhelm collaborators, even with visualizations to help. We extend prior work to study the effect of shared information on collaboration. We analyzed the success and discussion process of remote pairs trying to identify a serial killer in multiple crime cases. Each partner had half of t...

The mental structures that people apply towards other people have been shown to influence the way people cooperate with others. These mental structures or schemas evoke behavioral scripts. In this paper, we explore two different scripts, receptionist and information kiosk, that we propose channeled visitors' interactions with an interactive robot....

An online community is not sustainable unless at least a core of members participates and makes repeated visits. This article describes strategies for increasing commitment to online communities through two mechanisms inspired by social psychological theory – identity-based commitment, in which members feel connected to the group as a whole and its...

Many online communities experience insufficient contributions from their members. In order to encourage contributions to the community, we examined a website tailoring approach to fit a community's website interface with the motivations of the community. In particular, we used the characteristics of other websites as a method of gauging user motiva...

We present the design of the Snackbot, a robot that will deliver snacks in our university buildings. The robot is intended to provide a useful, continuing service and to serve as a research platform for long-term Human-Robot Interaction. Our design process, which occurred over 24 months, is documented as a contribution for others in HRI who may be...

Two recent studies of over 500 interdisciplinary research projects have documented comparatively poor outcomes of more distributed projects and the failed coordination mechanisms that partly account for these problems. In this paper we report results of an analysis of dyadic data from the most recent of these studies. The question we asked is, "Doe...

Scientific and engineering research increasingly involves multidisciplinary collaboration, sometimes across multiple organizations. Technological advances have made such cross-boundary projects possible, yet they can carry high coordination costs. This study investigated scientific collaboration across disciplinary and university boundaries to unde...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

Many online video sites provide a text chat feature so viewers can chat with others while watching videos. How does chatting affect their experience? Would audio chat be more fun or would it be too distracting? The richer medium of audio may more closely approximate the living room or club experience, but human factors research suggests that audio...

Collaboration in complex and dynamic environments such as hospitals, airlines, and disaster response teams is challenging. High performance requires smooth coordination across multiple groups whose incentives, cultures, and routines can conflict. In this paper, we present an in-depth case study of a hospital's operating room practices to understand...

Information visualizations can improve collaborative problem solving, but this improvement may depend on whether visualizations promote communication. In an experiment on the effect of network visualizations, remote pairs worked synchronously to identify a serial killer. They discussed disparate evidence distributed across the pair using IM. Four c...

Websites and technologies that promote sustainable behavior often employ direct persuasion by being open about persuasive intent. We examined the use of indirect persuasion, methods that do not make persuasive intent clear. We built two variants of a recipe website designed to induce changes in users: one using direct persuasion and the other using...

People's physical embodiment and presence increase their salience and importance. We predicted people would anthropomorphize an embodied humanoid robot more than a robot-like agent, and a collocated more than a remote robot. A robot or robot-like agent interviewed participants about their health. Participants were either present with the robot/agen...

We explored anthropomorphism in people's reactions to a robot in social context vs. their more considered judgments of robots in the abstract. Participants saw a photo and read transcripts from a health interview by a robot or human interviewer. For half of the participants, the interviewer was polite and for the other half, the interviewer was imp...

We examine how people's different uses of the Internet predict their later scores on a standard measure of depression, and how their existing social resources moderate these effects. In a longitudinal US survey conducted in 2001 and 2002, almost all respondents reported using the Internet for information, and entertainment and escape; these uses of...

Research on robotic helpers emphasizes their potential to improve human performance, but little attention has been given to the effects of robotic helpers on the social and psychological well-being of help recipients. Interactions with human helpers are not always positive and can threaten help recipients' confidence, independence, sense of identit...

Multi-university collaborations draw on diverse resources and expertise, but they impose coordination costs for bridging institutional differences and geographic distance. We report a study of the coordination activities and project outcomes of 491 research collaborations funded by the US National Science Foundation. Coordination activities, especi...

In this study, we examine the identity exploration possibilities presented by online multiplayer games in which players use graphics tools and character-creation software to construct an avatar, or character. We predicted World of Warcraft players would create their main character more similar to their ideal self than the players themselves were. O...

People consider other people who resemble them to be more persua- sive. Users may consider embodied conversational agents, or ECAs, to be more persuasive if the agents resemble them. In an experimental study, we found that users rated the persuasiveness of agents that resemble them higher than other agents. However, actual advice-taking diverged fr...