Tutorials and Workshops at HRI2008

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Experimental Design for Human-Robot Interaction

Overview

Do you want to know how to design an experiment or set of experiments to evaluate how good your robot-interface is? Or to figure out if "regular" people (i.e., people outside of your lab-group) can use your system? Or to systematically explore how cognition/social cognition/communication/interfaces/teamwork impacts your favorite robot? If so, you may be interested in this tutorial. We will explore:

• How to construct a research question that is amenable to experimental design
• Basic experimental design (what to measure, how to measure it, what your predictions are, who will be your subjects)
• Different experimental techniques (between, within, parametric, correlational, and observational designs)
• Several heuristics for determining the (approximate) number of participants you should run
• How to use experimental design to answer a specific question you have

This will be a working tutorial; people who come to this tutorial must bring with them a research question they want answered by experimental design (e.g., "I want to know whether my system that performs spatial perspective-taking improves collaboration"). We will work with several research questions and design experiments around them.

Who should sign up? Anyone who wants to learn the basics of experimental design. There are no prerequisites. This tutorial was offered last year at HRI07 (with high marks) and attendees had diverse backgrounds (computer scientists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, HCI researchers).

Important dates

• March 12, 2008: Workshop
• March 13-15, 2008: HRI 2008 Conference

Participation

The number of attendees is limited to 30.

Tutorial Organizer

Greg Trafton, Ph.D., is section head of the Intelligent Systems Section at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. He is a cognitive scientist with interests in HRI, interruptions/resumptions, and the cognition of complex visualizations. Greg received his BS in computer science (second major in psychology) from Trinity University and his Ph.D in cognitive psychology from Princeton University.