Bengisu Cagiltay

Michael F Xu, Bengisu Cagiltay, Yaxin Hu et al.

The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing them. In this work, we investigate how robot-facilitated communication tools might instead create new opportunities for family connection. We conducted two studies with families with children aged 5-12. We first explored the design space through in-home technology probe sessions with six families. These probes inspired us to explore two key interaction design dimensions: the robot's behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and the mode of communication (synchronous, asynchronous). We then conducted a laboratory study with 20 families to examine how the two dimensions shaped parent-child interaction and connection. Our findings characterize how parents and children appropriated robot-mediated exchanges, the tensions they experienced around initiative, timing, and privacy, and the opportunities they envisioned for supporting everyday connectedness.

Jack West, Bengisu Cagiltay, Shirley Zhang et al.

Machine learning models deployed locally on social media applications are used for features, such as face filters which read faces in-real time, and they expose sensitive attributes to the apps. However, the deployment of machine learning models, e.g., when, where, and how they are used, in social media applications is opaque to users. We aim to address this inconsistency and investigate how social media user perceptions and behaviors change once exposed to these models. We conducted user studies (N=21) and found that participants were unaware to both what the models output and when the models were used in Instagram and TikTok, two major social media platforms. In response to being exposed to the models' functionality, we observed long term behavior changes in 8 participants. Our analysis uncovers the challenges and opportunities in providing transparency for machine learning models that interact with local user data.

Christine P Lee, Bengisu Cagiltay, Bilge Mutlu

Social robots are increasingly introduced into children's lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the "unboxing" phenomenon in media suggests that introduction is key to technology adoption where initial impressions are made. To better understand this phenomenon toward designing a positive unboxing experience in the context of social robots for children, we conducted three field studies with families of children aged 8 to 13: (1) an exploratory free-play activity ($n=12$); (2) a co-design session ($n=11$) that informed the development of a prototype box and a curated unboxing experience; and (3) a user study ($n=9$) that evaluated children's experiences. Our findings suggest the unboxing experience of social robots can be improved through the design of a creative aesthetic experience that engages the child socially to guide initial interactions and foster a positive child-robot relationship.

Brian Tang, Dakota Sullivan, Bengisu Cagiltay et al.

As social robots become increasingly prevalent in day-to-day environments, they will participate in conversations and appropriately manage the information shared with them. However, little is known about how robots might appropriately discern the sensitivity of information, which has major implications for human-robot trust. As a first step to address a part of this issue, we designed a privacy controller, CONFIDANT, for conversational social robots, capable of using contextual metadata (e.g., sentiment, relationships, topic) from conversations to model privacy boundaries. Afterwards, we conducted two crowdsourced user studies. The first study (n=174) focused on whether a variety of human-human interaction scenarios were perceived as either private/sensitive or non-private/non-sensitive. The findings from our first study were used to generate association rules. Our second study (n=95) evaluated the effectiveness and accuracy of the privacy controller in human-robot interaction scenarios by comparing a robot that used our privacy controller against a baseline robot with no privacy controls. Our results demonstrate that the robot with the privacy controller outperforms the robot without the privacy controller in privacy-awareness, trustworthiness, and social-awareness. We conclude that the integration of privacy controllers in authentic human-robot conversations can allow for more trustworthy robots. This initial privacy controller will serve as a foundation for more complex solutions.