<aside> 🌟 Samantha Reig is a 6th year Ph.D. student in the HCII. She is advised by Professors Jodi Forlizzi and Aaron Steinfeld and is a member of the Transportation, Bots, and Disability Lab. She is also a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow. She is interested in how robots can communicate with people in socially acceptable and legible ways!

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🛰️ Could you tell me about your PhD research?

My research interests are mostly in human-robot interaction and human-agent interaction, so I look at questions like how can interactive social robots personalize the way they behave around people in service contexts. I also look at questions surrounding the idea of what happens when you take a social psychology type of phenomenon and study it with either embodied AI like robots or disembodied AI like conversational agents and smart speakers. I’m also interested in how things that we know about the way people interact in groups change when some of the entities that are interacting are artificial intelligence instead of human intelligence.

🛰️ Are there any projects you’re working on now or have recently you can talk about?

Part of my PhD funding is through NASA, as I'm a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow. As a Research Technology Fellow, ****I collaborate with people who work on Human-Robot and Human-Computer Interaction at NASA. We work on a lot of cool projects together, and the most recent one was about designing the conversational intelligence for future space habitats. NASA is planning to create the lunar gateway, which will be a lunar outpost for missions that are going into deep space. Those missions will sometimes be crewed, and sometimes uncrewed. When a mission has multiple people, one of the issues NASA is interested in is how do we design really complex autonomous systems to interact with people. We looked at ways that the notion of an artificial intelligence identity could interact differently with people in a simulated space environment to improve or change variables like trust in the system, trust in other astronauts, and comfort interacting with the system.

🛰️ What does a typical week look like for a PhD student in HCI at CMU?

My weeks look different based on the kind of work I’m doing at the time. My day-to-day tasks will change depending on what project I’m working on.

📗 I would say the NASA project was unusually independent in the sense that I'm the only student that worked on it. This project was really focused on answering a couple of specific research questions, so each day it was mostly a matter of me designing the materials that I needed, writing up a study plan, coding the interface, running some pilot data, and seeing what people think of the interface to make sure that it's usable.

📚 Earlier in my thesis, I did a couple of projects that were a lot more collaborative. They were concerned with how robots should personalize their behaviors for people in service contexts and how different contexts might influence what people find acceptable, unacceptable, or boundary pushing. On that project, we did this kind of theatrical prototyping method called user enactments where we brought people into the lab and had big, very obviously contrived prototypes of fake robots and products to create an environment. So a typical week would involve a lot more sitting together in the lab, talking through our scripts, talking through our plan, constantly reevaluating whether or not the scenarios that we were creating actually addressed our research questions.

🛰️ What made you want to pursue a PhD in HCI? Were there any specific courses in your undergrad that got you thinking about pursuing a PhD?

I knew that one thing that I would be most interested in doing was human-robot interaction (HRI), because that's what I did as an undergrad. I got interested in research by working on a class project with a grad student at my undergrad institution, Cornell University. It turned into a research project, which turned into me getting a research assistantship in that lab and continuing to work on that project and a few others. It was an HRI project on telepresence. I was really excited about the general topic of taking group interactions with people and putting robots into those contexts and seeing what happens. So when I applied to grad school, I knew that I wanted to do HRI.

🛰️ When applying to grad school, did you expect to still be in school now, 6 years after you graduated from undergrad?

I think the time commitment actually bothered me more when I started grad school than when I was thinking about it. When I was applying to grad school, I knew what I was getting into, and I knew that I was taking a pretty well defined path toward a goal. When I got to CMU and spent the first few weeks sitting in class, I realized that it was going to be six years of the same career. I had a mini crisis and was thinking “how can I live in this city, going to this school for longer than I did my undergrad?”, but as you get older, time goes faster, and it hasn't felt as long. While some aspects of a PhD are really monotonous, other aspects aren't, especially if you try to seek out ways to change it up. In some semesters, I was teaching; in other semesters, I was working more closely with other graduate student collaborators. The fact that there were so many different tasks that had to happen in the past six years made it feel more interesting.

🛰️ Could you talk more about the pros and cons of going straight into graduate school after a student graduates undergrad?

😁 Not losing momentum is definitely a pro. I know that some people who take some time off have a really hard time getting back into the idea of being in class. I never had to deal with that.