Joe Michaelis

On the heals of the Ratboy/Hop Butcher post, if your next post is a shot of Malort while you complain about ketchup on hot dogs, you‘ll unlock full Chicago mode

I'll see you there! Had a brief thought of suggesting a local meet up to attend, but its 8am Central, so I will certainly be enjoying this one in my PJs at home.

Would you like to join the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) 2026 organising committee as an Associate Chair? If you are passionate about driving high-quality research and shaping an outstanding programme, we welcome your application.

Submit an EOI ➡️
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

#IDC2026

Introducing the IDC2026 Chairs! Violet, a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University, is Web, Social Media & Communications Chair for IDC2026, and Juan Pablo is Professor at The University of Iowa's Department of Computer Science, taking on the role of Doctoral Consortium Chair. #IDC2026

Does social media harm everyone?

No. But it harms *most* adolescents.

However, not all platforms are harmful.

An analysis of 44,211 diaries from 479 adolescents over 100 days finds that 60% of adolescents experienced small, negative effects of social media
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🧵 Postdoc opportunity at McGill

I am recruiting a top postdoctoral researcher to join my lab at McGill through the Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards Initiative. This is a rare, well-funded opportunity to build an ambitious, multimodal EdTech research program in Canada.

Screenshot of an ACM Digital Library search result showing an AI-generated summary where an abstract of the article would usually appear.

What the absolute shit is this? ACM using AI summaries instead of abstracts in search results?! So, if I understand correctly, instead of the author's own summary of the work (i.e. an abstract) we are better off with some regurgitated slop version of that summary instead? @chi.acm.org

Excited to say that I'll be running more robot comedy events this spring! ROBOT RIOT brings together roboticists, ethicists, and some of Denver's funniest comedians, to inform the public about risks of AI and Robotics while making them laugh.

Our first show is 2/6/26:

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.