The latest breaking updates, delivered straight to your email inbox. Working from home during the pandemic has changed the way people live their daily lives. But let's take remote working a step further. What if you had a digital twin to help with your job? Pittsburgh's Action News 4 spoke with a Carnegie Mellon University professor who says the artificial intelligence could be happening in the near future.

An important part of the process is to bring in people from across disciplines, even if they have conflicting perspectives. A few years back, experts and pundits alike were predicting the highways of the 2020s would be packed full of autonomous vehicles. One glance and it's clear there are still, for better or worse, mainly human drivers out there on the roads, as driverless vehicles have hit many roadblocks. Their ability to make judgements in unforeseen events is still questionable, as is the ability of human riders to adapt and trust their robot drivers. Autonomous vehicles are just one example of the greater need for human-centered design, the theme of the recent Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence fall conference, in which experts urged more human involvement from the very start of AI development efforts.

Award-winning game designer Jessica Hammer will soon level up when she takes on the role of interim associate director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. "We are lucky to do exceptional research and teaching at the HCII. Even better, we get to combine the two to shape the future of human-computer interaction," said Hammer, the HCII's Thomas and Lydia Moran Assistant Professor of Learning Science. "I want to make sure that all members of our community -- from our first-year undergraduates to the most senior faculty -- can contribute to this mission." Hammer, who has often learned the hard way how to develop a game to meet its vision, said that her training will help her ensure the department's practices and organizations are best suited to meet its goals.

If robots are going to take over the world, they could at least have the courtesy not to bump into us while they're at it. That's not as easy as it sounds, though, especially when a robot is trying to make its way through a bustling space like a mall, hospital, or crowded city street. Thankfully, researchers have developed an algorithm that could give robots the ability to deftly maneuver through spaces packed with unpredictable humans. Robots are gradually leaving controlled spaces like labs and factories and edging into more settings in which they will inevitably encounter human beings (see "Are You Ready for a Robot Colleague?"). We navigate hectic spaces by reading other people's movements and planning our paths accordingly.

Believability of characters has been an objective in literature, theater, film, and animation. We argue that believable robot characters are important in human-robot interaction, as well. In particular, we contend that believable characters evoke users’ social responses that, for some tasks, lead to more natural interactions and are associated with improved task performance. In a dialogue-capable robot, a key to such believability is the integration of a consistent storyline, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and sociocultural context. We describe our work in this area and present empirical results from three robot receptionist testbeds that operate "in the wild."