UChicago Human-Robot Interaction Lab

Our paper Fictional vs. Factual Robot Tutor Dialogue Can Shape Child Social-Emotional Learning, led by Ph.D. student Lauren Wright and conducted in collaboration with Kiljoong Kim of Chapin Hall, received the Best Paper Award for User Studies at HRI 2026. This exciting work explores how the style of a robot tutor's dialogue — fictional versus factual — can shape children's social-emotional learning outcomes. The work has been featured in UChicago News, UChicago CS News, and Forbes. Congratulations to Lauren and all the authors!

Our lab traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland for the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026), where we presented three papers showcasing our recent research on human-robot interaction:

• Fictional vs. Factual Robot Tutor Dialogue Can Shape Child Social-Emotional Learning by Lauren L. Wright, Kaitlyn Li, Hewitt Watkins, Kiljoong Kim, and Sarah Sebo. This work was awarded the Best Paper Award for User Studies!
• Can You Help Me? The Influence of Robot Requests for Help on Child-Robot Connection by Teresa Flanagan, Justin Chenjia Zhang, Lin Bian, and Sarah Sebo
• Customizing Robot Personality: How Personality Control and Form Factor Shape Perceptions of a Robot as a Social Agent by Alex Wuqi Zhang, Aaron Huang, Allison J. Li, and Sarah Sebo

Our lab has published the Reduced-Length Connection-Coordination Rapport (CCR) Scale (Ting-Han Lin, G. Chen, Bilge Mutlu, J. Gregory Trafton, and Sarah Sebo) in ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. This new 8-item scale is a shortened and validated version of our full-length 18-item CCR Scale, designed to save time and reduce participant survey fatigue. Researchers interested in measuring human-robot rapport in their studies can learn more about both the full-length and reduced-length CCR scales on our CCR Scale resource page.

The work of our lab has recently been featured on UChicago's Inside the Lab series! Check out the video and the corresponding news article to learn more about our lab's mission and research areas, as well as some of the exciting projects we are working on.