Amazing work! Congrats to an incredible academic role model

AI generated website image showing full glasses of beer laying on their side and a beer bottle with no top.

AI generated website image showing full glass of wine and wine bottle laying on their sides on top of a plate.

Loveable little dive bar near my office clearly made an AI generated website. It.... did not go well. Did they still, uncritically, put the AI slop website out into the world? Take a gander at the sanity (and gravity) defying images for their bev menu and judge yourself.

Photo of Veronica speaking in front of an audience with final slide of presentation in background.

Congrats to LIT Lab PhD candidate Veronica Grosso who presented at the first Robotics Seminar Series at UIC Engineering on resisting stereotypes to show competence and warmth in #HRI. Did we need to buy tiny toys and treats for bunnies to test these collaborative activities? Yes, dear reader, we did

Title slide of HRI presentation on human-robot collaboration

Depiction of study interaction with a robot

Big moment for UIC LIT lab. PhD student, Verona Grosso, just presented our work on collaborating with a robot. @hri-conference.bsky.social Robots need to dynamically demonstrate competence and advocate for choices.

Opening slide to HRI talk with presenter to the side

Michael Xu from Wisconsin CS presents work on integrating robots into family life. Happy to be a collaborator on this messy real world exploration. @hri-conference.bsky.social #HRI

#HRI2026 @hri-conference.bsky.social is off to a fantastic start. Benjamin Rosman opened the first day with a powerful keynote on making HRI research more inclusive and truly representative of our diverse world. A timely reminder that the future we build depends on who we include in the process.

Screenshot of key insights from HRI presentation

Abena Boadi-Agyemang from @cmu.edu with nuanced insights in accessibility needs for HRI. would love to see ASL inputs for more robots @hri-conference.bsky.social

Ready, Set, Go! 🤖🚀

🏰Day 2 of HRI 2026 is starting at Edinburgh International Conference Center, EICC!

🫂Our amazing General Chairs, Lynne Baillie and Bill Smart are welcoming us!

🎙️Don’t miss the Keynote by Benjamin Rosman starting now in Auditorium.

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...