Joe Michaelis

Get there early for www.spectaculousmusic.com

For anyone who cares about rich studies that center and value children throughout the entire R&D process, this is a lovely community for your work.

It's unboxing day for DEGREES OF FREEDOM from @mitpress.bsky.social! :D

Well, at least we didn't make online survey experiments the dominant methodological approach in major areas of the discipline

OMG. THIS. PAPER. IS. PERFECT!!! I am going to staple the How to Assess Qualitative Research section to a boxing glove and add that as supporting material for my next HRI submission. doi.org/10.1080/0737...

Oh that is rough. That’s on the paper chair for not seeing the problem.

Reviews that don’t appropriately evaluate based on the method have been killing me lately. If I had a dollar for every review of a qual paper that criticized a lack of generalizability…

Holy crap. I thought my conference homes were broken, but the guardrail for oversubmitting set to 25… wow

My god, the band broke up when I was 4! This was mandatory listening for the weird punk set I ran with in high school. Rancid, Op Ivy, were gateway bands into the 80s punk (e.g. Bad Religion, NOFX) we gravitated towards.

Salad Days, by Minor Threat 3 track album

At the "listening to Minor Threat while grant writing" stage of disillusionment, burnout and frustration with the crumbling systems of academia. Turns out teen angst and existential threat are on the same spectrum of anxiety and rage. minorthreat.bandcamp.com/album/salad-...

Loving this talk from @joemichaelis.bsky.social at Northwestern today—Mental models at the intersection of Human-Robot Interaction!

Current status

EPFL, ETH Zurich & CSCS just released Apertus, Switzerland’s first fully open-source large language model.
Trained on 15T tokens in 1,000+ languages, it’s built for transparency, responsibility & the public good.

Read more: actu.epfl.ch/news/apertus...

We've recently concluded a classroom study in Japan on our "Mindful Math" Tutor, an LLM-embedded ITS that uses mindful language and messages to guide students learn algebra while calming down their math anxiety. If interested in testing/using/collaborating let me know! tomonag.org/mindfulmath/

@hri-conference.bsky.social reviewer assignments started... I like to dig in to find reviewers who really can connect with a paper. First paper I found a group of authors writing on a very similar application... perfect, right!? So similar in fact, I think it may actually just be the same people🫠

Flag flown at Cubs home games when they win. Large blue W on a white background.

Robotic reading companions can mitigate oral reading anxiety in children Children exhibit fewer physiological indicators of anxiety when reading aloud to a robot compared with reading to a person.

🤖 Robots and reading anxiety

A study with 8–11 year olds found kids were less anxious reading aloud to a robot than to a person. Robots may help children build literacy skills with less stress.

🔗 doi.org/10.1126/scir...

#SciComm 🧪 #Education #Robots #Literacy

I spend a good chunk of my HRI class dunking on unkept promises of humanoid robotics. Love the thoughtful and well documented suppport of that position

Well my instinct to want to be included may just swallow me whole this year. What does one do if you are already an AC for @chi.acm.org and @hri-conference.bsky.social invites you to be an AC there, too? You kiss all other responsibilities goodbye and embrace the chaos, right? #HCI #HRI

Bear stress

I'd love some commiseration or ideas from the BlueSky void if you have them. Will also report back what came out of my class chat.

After tamping down my initial rage, I realize what I'm trying to do is incompatible with how students engage. So, I'll be going hat in hand to class tomorrow to invite an open discussion of how to proceed.

So, it feels like communicating with writing is dead. I'm banging my head on how to have students think and communicate for classes now but I don't have an answer. Class discussion, yes, but that runs in series, so can't work for a class of 20, and how do I get them to think outside of class?

Shell shocked at how ubiquitous turning in LLM writing is. Knew it would be a lot, but literally every paper (1-2 pages) I read today was fully authored by an LLM. I thought if I made it clear I just wanted ideas, thoughts, feeling, and didn't care about grammar or structure, it would help, but nope

🚀 Exciting news: I’m accepting new graduate students in the McGill Faculty of Education Learning Sciences! If you’re passionate about educational technology, games, AI, and learning sciences, this is your chance to join a dynamic and interdisciplinary research program.

Psychologists, apply! Apparently we've mainly gotten CS applicants so far. I'd (selfishly) love to have a psychologist. Interests in AI in relation to e.g., implicit bias; cultural influences; fairness; perception; learning & memory; decision making etc. would be a good fit!

Just cited this. We're finding that expert teachers are telling us they *want* automation, but end up using LLM-generated content infrequently when given the option. Seems that expert fluency is pretty powerful. This METR study really helps develop that idea to provide some nuanced context.

I've had such great collaborators, Sarah Sebo and Lauren Wright at UChicago, and Bilge Mutlu at UW-Madison, for this work. Lauren in particular pulled off an incredible study and report that I'm thrilled to see published. Feel free to reach out for author's copies if you are paywalled by AAAS

The second explores an intuition I've had for some time - kids often tell us the robot didn't judge them. Lauren Wright's article, "Robotic reading companions can mitigate oral reading anxiety in children" demonstrates the actual impact of that feeling on reading anxiety.

Figure depicting four challenges of in-home educational robot. The challenges are disruption of routines, replacement of activities and human participation, unclear roles and privacy concerns. The figure shows solutions including integrating into existing routines, augmenting existing educational experiences, clearly defining roles, and using privacy-preserving data collection and use

Two fresh articles out in Science Robotics www.science.org/journal/scir..., and on the website banner! First is a focus article "How can educational robots enhance family life? Through careful integration." We look at what it will take for in-home robots to actually be adopted by families. #HRI #HCI