- Good morning.
I just wanna say, this guy is a display genius,
getting my slides up.
I'm gonna start my talk off with my main message.
This is the one take away point
that I want you to remember from the talk.
And it is this.
Telepresence attendance needs to focus on a range
of usage models, personalization is a challenge
and social norms continue to develop.
I'm going to illustrate this message to you today
by talking about studies we've done
on Telepresence Robot Attendance
at UB Comp, CSCW and CHI over the last few years.
Now as we all know, conferences are important
in the research community.
It's the last day of CHI, it's the nine A.M. session
and you all are here just really pointing
to that emphasis on that idea.
We come here to see presentations by various people.
To see papers, to see talks, to see plenaries.
We also come to network with other individuals
to find collaborators, to find jobs
and lots of many additional reasons.
But the reality is, attendance is not always easy.
It's not easy for everybody to come
to a conference like CHI.
People have accessibility challenges that might
make it difficult to actually travel or move
about the conference setting.
There's also sometimes travel restrictions,
maybe bans on Visas going between different countries,
or people with new babies that make it difficult to travel.
And there's also times cost restrictions
not everybody can afford to come to a conference like CHI.
So what we've done over the last few years
is try to explore different mechanisms
to allow people to remotely attend conferences like CHI.
In particular through the use of Telepresence Robots
that you see on the screen here,
and these are Beam Pros created by Suitable Technologies.
So we've studied them across a number of conferences
to understand how people can actually remotely
attend through them.
Now of course this is not the first research
that has looked at Telepresence Robots.
There's a lot of studies that looked at their usage
in work places, settings for meetings,
and for casual interactions.
There's also research on attendance
at Avatar based conferences in virtual worlds.
And what we do is we build on this research
to more deeply explore robot usage at a conference
like CHI.
Now as I said, we studied remote attendance
at three conferences, the first one
is UB Comp 2014, which is co-located with ISWC,
the International Symposium on Wearable Computing.
CSCW 2016 and then CHI 2016.
Now to give you a sense of the different types
of conferences, if you're not too familiar with them,
UB Comp 2014 had about 800 local people.
We had seven remote attendees using six dedicated robots.
And it's a fairly medium sized conference,
I would say three paper tracks running in parallel.
CSCW had around the same number of local people
and then we had 19 remote people attend
using a combination of shared and dedicated robots.
And there were five paper tracks.
And then CHI 2016 had 3700 local people
and we had 33 remote attendees using ten shared robots
across 16 paper tracks.
Now what I want to emphasize across these conferences
is the type of robot usage we were exploring,
as you can see in the yellow color.
We tried a combination of dedicated robots
and also shared robots to understand how people would
see the different experiences
and how that behavior might change over time.
And I'll get into more detail about that in a few minutes.
Now across these conferences, we use a variety
of data collection methods.
We had ad hoc observations where we would go to the sessions
that remote attendees were actually attending
using their robot.
We also conducted focus groups and interviews
and I'll bet you that's the first time you've ever seen
a focus group with people and Telepresence Robots before.
We also collected daily diary information
asking the people at the end of their day,
what was the experience like,
what was positive, what was negative
and how could we improve on the experience for them?
What I'm going to do now is step through
the results from each of the conferences
and show you kind of how things evolved over time
and what the experience is like.
So first, starting with UB Comp, back in 2014,
which was held in Seattle in the United States.
So first and foremost, what really stood out for us
was a sense of empowerment.
The idea that the remote attendees really felt
like they could do something that they were not able
to do in any other way.
Especially for those who had accessibility challenges.
This was a real game changer for them,
in that they could actually physically move
throughout the space without having concerns.
To the point where the robot actually felt like
an extension of their own body, their own self,
where they may be driving along, bump into something,
or somebody might bump into them,
and they actually felt like their own body
was being bumped into,
it was that close of a tie between them
and the embodiment of the robot.
Now when we're at a conference, as you know,
we're wearing these badges that have our name
and that's really how we present ourselves to others,
in addition to how we look, our hairstyle,
our clothes and so on.
But when you're in a Telepresence Robot,
you kind of all look the same.
Especially if you're looking from the back side
where you don't see the display.
And so we're really cognizant of watching
what effect this might have on the remote attendees.
We had suggested ahead of time that people send us
an item that we could attach to their Telepresence Robot,
to make them stand out a little bit.
But only one person actually did this,
but it turned out to be super successful,
as you can see here,
the scarf is attached to the top,
it kind of floats down as she goes down the aisle
into the beginning of the session.
So it was really beneficial and people in the conference
could actually really identify who this person was
when approaching from behind the Telepresence Robot.
So it worked well.
We also learned that it can be really difficult
to attend a conference using a Telepresence Robot
for a long period of time.
This is the schedule for one day of UB Comp,
it's pretty packed, just like CHI is,
maybe not quite so much,
but there's still a lot going on.
And people found it challenging because
they have their own schedule
and they're in two places at once
and things that happen in their local setting
kind of impact their time at the remote place.
For example, picking up kids from daycare,
you still have to do it.
People also experience effects from time zones.
Those who were attending remotely from Europe
really could only stay at UB Comp in the robot
til maybe early afternoon because at that point in time
it was already pretty late into the evening.
So it was a challenge.
And it was also pretty cognitively demanding
to be in a Telepresence Robot from maybe more
than a couple of hours.
Because it's actually hard to navigate and drive
while also talking to people at the same time.
We also found that there was challenges around social norms
and understanding what to do in a Telepresence Robot
and what's okay and what's acceptable.
For example, people found it really difficult
to understand where they should park to see the talks.
It was hard to see slides from the back of the room,
but then driving to the front of the room
meant that now all of a sudden you're blocking the view
from people who are sitting down
and you can't really adjust the height of these robots,
at least the ones we used.
So what was interesting to us was the remote attendees
actually started a way to understand social norms
and what to do on their own accord
they created a back channel in Hangouts
and started talking to each other and saying,
how do you control your volume, how do you know
how loud you are, where are parking, what's working well?
And there's a really interesting conversation
that we were luckily invited to observe.
So in summary, what we saw at UB Comp
was that dedicated robots really empowered people.
But they struggled with using them all the time
and for long periods of time at a conference.
Remote attendees also wanted help understanding how
to behave.
It was such a new experience
and they didn't really necessarily know
what to do or what was acceptable.
Now following from UB Comp, we said, let's try it again
and let's look at what we learned in UB Comp
and try to improve the experience
and explore additional facets.
And so here we wanted to really build in the idea
this issue of dedicated robots and try out shared robots
as an alternate experience.
And CSCW 2016 was held in San Francisco, California,
just to give you a sense of context and space.
We had three workshop attendees use dedicated robots
for the entire portion of time that they were able
to attend the workshop.
And three people attended the main conference program
using a dedicated robot
and then 13 people shared robots, where they would
have various time slices throughout the conference
that they pre signed up for.
Now what's interesting about this last set,
is we actually had two different
research groups share their robot
amongst the research groups.
For example, the first case, a professor shared his robot
with two of his graduate students.
And in the second case, seven graduate students shared
the robot together, while their faculty member
was present at the conference locally.
We also built on the idea of personalization.
So this time we said, you have to send us something.
Send us something we can easily attach to
the top of the robot, so it can be visible from afar.
And people were actually really good about doing this.
For the small, there were people that didn't
and this is my grad student, Ray, in the robot here.
We attached a colored balloon to the top of the robot
just to get it a bit of sense of difference between
the other robots and it purposely was meant
to bob up and down so it was a bit more noticeable
over a distance.
In terms of dedicated attendance, moving on to the results,
we found that again it was challenging
to be in two places at once.
But we knew better about this challenge ahead of time,
so we actually talked to the remote attendees
and said, this is gonna be difficult, make sure you plan
things out really well to know that you are going
to be in two places at once, essentially.
And people did this and it worked well for those
that were able to talk to their family or coworkers
and say I'm gonna be at a conference, I'm away
for this time period.
And they were really receptive of that.
So that worked actually well,
but it did require pre planning.
Now for those had time slices
and asynchronously shared the robots,
this actually also really worked well
because they didn't feel as responsible for that robot,
they didn't feel like they had paid to be
at the conference and they had to attend
for the entire time.
So there's a lot less guilt because they knew
they could just pop in for their time sessions
and that was totally okay.
We also saw interesting sharing patterns immerge
for things that we had not thought about.
We basically gave people the opportunity to use the robot
as they felt and people used it in different ways.
For example, one professor brought his entire class
to CSCW, you can kind of see them in the background.
While beneficial for them to experience what it was like
to be at the conference,
now all of a sudden you have these different
set of needs and perspectives between maybe
the students who might not wanna be on camera
and the professor who was totally fine with it.
But really that robot is designed for only a single person.
We also saw small group sharing emerge,
where two people or three people try and use
the robot at the same time.
While beneficial again, now there's this awkwardness
where you have to sit very close to that person
within their social space in order to be on camera
and to see what's visible.
And you're looking at a pretty small laptop screen.
In terms of the presentation of self,
attaching these physical items worked fairly well.
However, for cases where people were sharing
a Telepresence Robot amongst their research lab,
it was challenging because they had one set of items
to represent their institution.
But people talked about the idea of wanting to have
individualized items, specific to
their own personality, perhaps.
The balloons, didn't work so well.
People felt that when they had a Telepresence Robot
with the balloon attached to it,
it was maybe a little less serious
and they received less serious conversations
from people as a result.
We also experimented with a back channel
we set up in Skype, this time, trying to address
technical issues that might come up for remote attendees,
such as, why is the WiFi down, my robot's not working,
but it actually turned into again, a channel for people
to talk about social things and figuring out where
they should be in the room, when it was okay to leave.
And they actually very quickly understood
that we were observing from the sessions
and took advantage of that and would ask us,
I know you can see the robot in the room,
am I in a good spot, am I blocking anybody's view and so on.
In summary, remote attendance involves different
attendance models than in person attendance.
Shared Beams provided value, but did create identity issues.
Lastly, I'm gonna briefly talk about CHI 2016.
And here what we wanted to do is understand
what might happen when you scale very big.
When you go to a very big conference with lots of people,
and even more remote people sharing a greater
number of robots.
Again we looked at personalization this time,
we used colored flags because we didn't want
to have to change personalization items over time
with that many people.
And they were quite easy to see at a distance,
which made it nice and they were also sort of
at a certain height, so it'd be nice
to spot over people's heads.
Now the biggest thing we learned from CHI
was a shift in behaviors in terms
of what was important to people.
Where as in UB Comp and CSCW,
they participated in all of the conference stuff
you would normally do if you were in person.
Here they became much more, what I would say
is utilitarian and functional and really
wanted to just see the talks.
And they recognized the size of the venue,
pretty much very similar to here,
a lot of space to cover if you're trying
to get between sessions,
and it would take about a good ten to 15 minute drive
and then you would often see situations like this,
where people would quickly run over
and try to get a picture with you
and talk with you, which would slow it down even more.
People saw this and realized, it's probably gonna mean
I'm ending up at the back of many sessions,
which is not easy to see through a Telepresence Robot.
So they became very strategic and would pick and choose
which robots they were going to use based on
where they were docked.
And we had multiple docking stations
that you see in purple here
and they were trying to pick one that was close
to the actual room they were going to.
They would also drive the robot ahead of time
into sessions and just park it at the front of the room
and wait for the session to start.
So effectively, they were turning this fairly rich
embodiment of a robot, that was really mobile
and purposeful for that reason, into something
just to stream the talk, which is not entirely different
than just watching it online.
So in summary, what we see is, large scale events, like CHI,
can create new challenges and shift behaviors
to focus on utilitarian needs, which is much different
than what we saw for the more medium sized conferences
like UB Comp and CSCW.
Now lastly, just a few points on discussion
and design opportunities.
So very clearly we see varying usage and design models
for Telepresence Robots and remote attendance.
We see cases where having a dedicated robot
is extremely valuable for some people
and very much empowering.
But then there are also cases where you might think
attendance is quite different.
When we go to a conference in person,
we pay for ourselves, we attend and we're just ourselves.
But there's ways to bring broader groups of people,
whether it's a class or even small groups together
that might want to share some design,
but this technology's really only designed
for a single person, that's the intended usage.
And going beyond that is actually kind of awkward,
there's social issues and so really
there are design opportunities.
And there's also ways of thinking about other
attendance models, it's not just about Telepresence Robots,
but there's ways to maybe navigate between
different technologies like live streaming,
robots and other things.
Personalization is clearly a challenge
and obviously it's not a good solution if you want to scale
to go to physical items attached to robots,
but there's lots of design opportunities
for digital augmentations, additional screenings,
additional appendages and so on that you might think of.
And then lastly, there's clearly challenges
around knowledge sharing.
How do allow people to understand
what is socially acceptable
to do, and how do those norms evolve over time?
The conversations around that for these conferences
really happened in the back channel.
Where people would talk, especially the remote attendees,
about what was good to do,
but really we think there's design opportunities
to open this up, to have the broader conversation
with more people.
So to conclude, I'm just gonna go back to my message
that Telepresence attendance needs to focus
on a range of usage models.
Personalization is a challenge
and social norms continue to develop
and there's many ways we can look to design
to support these needs.
Thank you.
(clapping)
- [Woman] Okay, we have time
for a couple of quick questions.
- [Man 1] Hi, I'm (man's name) from Bombay, thanks for
the wonderful talk.
The question is more from the point of view
of a conference organizer.
So of course we see the normal Beam rewards here,
at CHI this year.
But if you have to put these up in future events,
is this now the most optimum solution
or do you think maybe we should try streaming stuff first
and then provide the mobility aspect later?
- Yah, so that's a really great question.
And unfortunately what we don't get to talk about
in our TOCHI article is all of the background, policy stuff.
And there's a ton of it, a ton of challenges
that still need to be addressed.
I think the most basic answer to your question is
the right remote attendance solution is multiple solutions.
There are times when robots work really well
and that is in sort of small scale, group interactions,
not so great in watching a talk like this,
if you were to park it, you could then turn to live stream.
But the challenge is, I think there's value in
knowing who's around, who's present
and that you're watching that talk
because then maybe you can catch somebody in the hallway
as they're leaving this session if you wanna talk to them.
So really the answer is multiple solutions,
but venues pose really great challenges.
I'm happy to chat offline after.
- [Man 2] I have full op question on that (mumbles)
from the University of Munich.
So I think, what it hints from your research and others,
that basically the streaming is now quite well established
and I think there's having an idea of how this could
be done, this mixing between these modalities
as you (mumbles).
So basically, when (mumbles) in hole four at the moment,
I think a robot would be really great,
I could choose which way to go, who to talk to,
I'm happy to be stopped, but being in here,
I'm also not talking to many people while I do this.
Do you have an idea of how this transitions
because I haven't seen any research (mumbles)
transitions between those solutions.
Do you have any insight what could be a way
of getting those transitions right?
- Yes, my answer is probably too long for the time we have,
I'm happy to chat after.
But I think you're right.
This is really the design space that we need
to understand and explore now, for sure.
Thanks.