Irene Rae and Dan Szafir, graduate students in the HCI Group, will be giving practice talks for their upcoming presentations at the CHI Conference. The HCI Lab invites graduate students and faculty to come enjoy cookies, hear about Irene and Dan's research, and give them feedback.

Talk 1: In-body Experiences: Embodiment, Control, and Trust in Robot-Mediated Communication

Irene Rae, Leila Takayama, & Bilge Mutlu

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--physical embodiment and control of this embodiment. We studied the impact of physical embodiment and control upon interpersonal trust in a controlled laboratory experiment using three different videoconferencing settings: (1) a handheld tablet controlled by a local user, (2) an embodied system controlled by a local user, and (3) an embodied system controlled by a remote user (n = 29 dyads). We found that physical embodiment and control by the local user increased the amount of trust built between partners. These results suggest that both physical embodiment and control of the system influence interpersonal trust in mediated communication and have implications for future system designs.

Talk 2: ARTFuL: Adaptive Review Technology for Flipped Learning

Daniel Szafir, Bilge Mutlu

Internet technology is revolutionizing education. Teachers are developing massive open online courses (MOOCs) and using innovative practices such as flipped learning in which students watch lectures at home and engage in hands-on, problem solving activities in class. This work seeks to explore the design space afforded by these novel educational paradigms and to develop technology for improving student learning. Our design, based on the technique of adaptive content review, monitors student attention during educational presentations and determines which lecture topic students might benefit the most from reviewing. An evaluation of our technology within the context of an online art history lesson demonstrated that adaptively reviewing lesson content improved student recall abilities 29% over a baseline system and was able to match recall gains achieved by a full lesson review in less time. Our findings offer guidelines for a novel design space in dynamic educational technology that might support both teachers and online tutoring systems.