HRI research using autonomous robots in real-world settings can produce results with the highest ecological validity of any study modality, but many difficulties limit such studies' feasibility and effectiveness. We propose Vid2Real HRI, a research framework to maximize real-world insights offered by video-based studies. The Vid2Real HRI framework was used to design an online study using first-person videos of robots as real-world encounter surrogates. The online study ($n = 385$) distinguished the within-subjects effects of four robot behavioral conditions on perceived social intelligence and human willingness to help the robot enter an exterior door. A real-world, between-subjects replication ($n = 26$) using two conditions confirmed the validity of the online study's findings and the sufficiency of the participant recruitment target ($22$) based on a power analysis of online study results. The Vid2Real HRI framework offers HRI researchers a principled way to take advantage of the efficiency of video-based study modalities while generating directly transferable knowledge of real-world HRI. Code and data from the study are provided at https://vid2real.github.io/vid2realHRI

As robots have become increasingly common in human-rich environments, it is critical that they are able to exhibit social cues to be perceived as a cooperative and socially-conformant team member. We investigate the effect of robot gaze cues on people's subjective perceptions of a mobile robot as a socially present entity in three common hallway navigation scenarios. The tested robot gaze behaviors were path-oriented (looking at its own future path), or person-oriented (looking at the nearest person), with fixed-gaze as the control. We conduct a real-world study with 36 participants who walked through the hallway, and an online study with 233 participants who were shown simulated videos of the same scenarios. Our results suggest that the preferred gaze behavior is scenario-dependent. Person-oriented gaze behaviors which acknowledge the presence of the human are generally preferred when the robot and human cross paths. However, this benefit is diminished in scenarios that involve less implicit interaction between the robot and the human.

Customer service workers at a Fortune 500 software firm who were given access to generative artificial intelligence tools became 14% more productive on average than those who were not, with the least-skilled workers reaping the most benefit. That's according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who tested the impact of generative AI tools on productivity at the company over the course of a year. The research marks the first time the impact of generative AI tools on work has been measured outside the lab. Prior studies have benchmarked the capabilities of large language models against tasks in fields like law and medicine -- showing that, for example, GPT-4 aces the bar exam in the 90th percentile. Other research has tested the tech's impact on workers' performance of isolated writing tasks in small-scale laboratory settings.