Kate M. Tsui

SUMMARY

With the recent emergence of several new telepresence platforms, companies are investigating these technologies for ad-hoc conversations beyond the conference room. This technology has the potential to increase cohesion for people who work in a remote location from their team.

We hypothesize that people with disabilities who may live full time in a medical institution can gain similar benefits. For example, medically fragile students could use a robot to attend their regular classes at school (see CNN and Texomas). Elders in nursing homes or family members residing in medical institutions can “hang out” as if they were physically together. To this end, we are beginning a new study in conjunction with Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center investigating if telepresence robots can recreate the closeness of daily interactions and mitigate isolation.

Our research focuses on the scenario in which people with special needs take the active role of operating telepresence robots. In the first stage of our research, we are investigating what autonomous robot navigation behaviors are necessary, how these navigation behaviors should be designed to function in social situations, and how a user interface to control a telepresence robot should be designed for people with special needs with a simple and minimal aesthetic.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

Katherine M. Tsui, Munjal Desai, and Holly A. Yanco. Towards Measuring the Quality of Interaction: Communication through Telepresence Robots. Proceedings of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop (PerMIS), College Park, Maryland, March 20-22, 2012. [PRESENTATION]

Katherine M. Tsui, Adam Norton, Daniel Brooks, Holly A. Yanco, and David Kontak. Designing Telepresence Robot Systems for Use by People with Special Needs. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality of Life Technologies 2011: Intelligent Systems for Better Living, held in conjunction with RESNA 2011 as part of FICCDAT, Toronto, Canada, June 6-7, 2011. [PRESENTATION]

PRESS

2012-11-09 Museum of Science Boston's Current Science and Technology (CST) podcast interview

Click the thumbnail for a high-resolution photo.

	"Hugo (an augmented VGo Communication's telepresence robot) is being remotely driven and being used to walk alongside a colleague, actively participating in a mobile conversation. The driver can be seen on Hugo's screen." Kate Tsui is the robot driver and next to her is Adam Norton. Adam is an educator and designer working in the UMass Lowell Robotics Lab. Photo credit goes to John Fertitta.
	"The top half of Hugo (an augmented VGo Communications' VGo telepresence robot) features a light-up LED tie, used to indicate the robot's status. The driver can be seen on Hugo's screen." Photo credit goes to Adam Norton.

"For the last time dude, everyone thinks your robot is cool, but you don't need to talk to us through it when you’re in the next room."

SUMMARY

Commercial telepresence robots can be thought of as embodied video conferencing on wheels. Several companies now produce and sell telepresence robots for the purposes of providing interactive 2-way audio and video. Additionally, these teleprensece robots’ mobility provides the operator the means to explore as he/she desires. The companies have envisioned telepresence robots being used for a variety of applications such has as having ad-hoc office conversations, conducting patient rounds in hospitals, and touring manufacturing facilities. 

FEATURED PRESS

Brett Davis. Robots at the water cooler and at home. Using telepresence robots to make the workplace, home life more flexible. Mission Critical, Volume 1, Number 3, Fall 2011, pp. 20.

"If you can't measure it, you can't claim it." ~Terry Fong, August 2010

In addition to my research projects, I have spent a lot of time focusing on how their success can be measured. This means 1.) formulating hypotheses, 2.) finding the appropriate performance measures to uphold or disprove the hypotheses, 3.) developing and running human-subjects experiments, and 4.) performing statistical analysis of the data to understand if the hypotheses are upheld.

I presented a quick tutorial of the tips and techniques that this computer scientist has learned about social sciences. See my tutorial presentation given at Robotics: Science and Systems 2011 Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction, Perspectives and Contributions to Robotics from the Human Sciences on July 1, 2011; [CLICK TO DOWNLOAD PRESENTATION]

I've also accumulated a growing list of tools pertaining to statistical analysis et cetera, that I periodically update.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

Katherine M. Tsui and Holly Yanco. Towards Establishing Clinical Credibility for Rehabilitation and Assistive Robots Through Experimental Design. In Proceedings of the Robotics: Science and Systems Workshop on Good Experimental Methodology in Robotics. June 28, 2009.

Katherine M. Tsui, Holly Yanco, David Kontak, and Linda Beliveau. Experimental Design for Human-Robot Interaction with Assistive Technology. Human-Robot Interaction Conference Workshop on Robotic Helpers: User Interaction, Interfaces and Companions in Assistive and Therapy Robotics, March 12, 2008.

PERFORMANCE MEASURES

TELEPRESENCE ROBOTS

Katherine M. Tsui, Munjal Desai, and Holly A. Yanco. Towards Measuring the Quality of Interaction: Communication through Telepresence Robots. Proceedings of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop (PerMIS), College Park, Maryland, March 20-22, 2012. [PRESENTATION]

Katherine M. Tsui, Munjal Desai, Holly A. Yanco, Henriette Cramer, and Nicander Kemper. Measuring Attitudes Towards Telepresence Robots. International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems, Special Issue on Quantifying the Performance of Intelligent Systems. Volume 16, Number 2, June 2011.

Katherine M. Tsui, Munjal Desai, Holly A. Yanco, Henriette Cramer, and Nicander Kemper. Using the "Negative Attitudes Toward Robots Scale" with Telepresence Robots. Proceedings of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop (PerMIS). September 2010.

ASSISTIVE ROBOTICS

Katherine M. Tsui, Kareem Abu-Zahra, Renato Casipe, Jason M'Sadoques, and Jill L. Drury. Developing Heuristics for Assistive Robotics. Late-breaking paper at the 5th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Osaka, Japan, March 3-5, 2010.

Katherine M. Tsui, Kareem Abu-Zahra, Renato Casipe, Jason M'Sadoques, and Jill L. Drury. A Process for Developing Specialized Heuristics: Case Study in Assistive Robotics. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Technical Report #2009-11, December 2009.

Katherine M. Tsui, Holly Yanco, David Feil-Seifer, and Maja Mataric. Methods for Evaluating Assistive Robotic Technology. Chapter 3 of Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Intelligent Systems, pp 41-56. Edited by Raj Madhavan, Edward Tunstel, and Elena Messina. Springer, 2009.

Katherine M. Tsui, Holly Yanco, David Feil-Seifer, and Maja Mataric. Survey of Domain-Specific Performance Measures in Assistive Robotic Technology. Proceedings of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop (PerMIS), R. Madhavan and E. Messina (eds.), NIST Special Publication 1090, pages 116-123, August 2008.

BIOGRAPHY

Kate Tsui is a computer science doctoral candidate at UMass Lowell under Dr. Holly Yanco. From 2001 through 2006, Kate worked for Sun Microsystems in several software engineering roles, including development and quality assurance. In 2004, she graduated from UMass Lowell with her BS in computer science. In Fall 2006 and Spring 2007, Kate served as the teaching assistant for 91.301 Organization of Programming Languages; she is a guest lecturer for this class. She received her MS in computer science in 2008.

In her current role at UMass Lowell's Robotics Lab, Kate is specializing in robotics and human-robot interaction as an assistive technology researcher. Her primary research is at the cross section of computer science, robotics, assistive technology, human-robot interaction, and human-computer interaction. From 2006 through 2009, she and her collaborators at the University of Central Florida developed vision-based control of a wheelchair-mounted robotic arm for users with cognitive impairments to pick up an object.

Kate’s dissertation research focuses on developing telepresence robots with people who have disabilties and must live away from their families and friends for medical purposes. She is working towards the vision of this population as the telepresence robot operators. The robot would be located in their families' homes, and the people with disabilities would be able to visit at their choosing, as if they were there. She hypothesizes that telepresence robots can be used to recreate the closeness of daily interactions for personal relationships and mitigate isolation and loneliness.

Kate is also actively involved with increasing participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields through educational outreach to K-16 students. Additionally, she founded the Women in Computer Science group in September 2007 and served as its president through June 2009.

INTERESTS

ACADEMIC: Human-robot interaction, assistive technology, human-computer interaction, evaluation, experimental design, performance measures, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning

FUN: Rock climbing, hiking, photography, gardening, cooking (not baking!)