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1. RoboART: Artistic Robot Programming in Mixed Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW62533.2024.00390  

   Fronchetti, Felipe; Popiela, Miles; Spinola, Rodrigo; Brixey, Shawn (March 2024, IEEE)

   Articulated robots are attracting the attention of artists worldwide. Due to their precise, tireless, and efficient nature, robots are now being deployed in different forms of creative expression, such as sculpting, choreography, immersive environments, and cinematography. While there is a growing interest among artists in robotics, programming such machines is a challenge for most professionals in the field, as robots require extensive coding experience and are primarily designed for industrial applications and environments. To enable artists to incorporate robots in their projects, we propose an end-user-friendly robot programming solution using an intuitive spatial computing environment designed for Microsoft Hololens 2. In our application, the robot movements are synchronized with a hologram via network communication. Using natural hand gestures, users can manipulate, animate, and record the hologram similar to 3D animation software, including the advantages of mixed reality interaction. Our solution not only gives artists the ability to translate their creative ideas and movements to an industrial machine but also makes human-robot interaction safer, as robots can now be accurately and effectively operated from a distance. We consider this an important step in a more human-driven robotics community, allowing creators without robot programming experience to easily script and perform complex sequences of robotic movement in service of new arts applications. Making robots more collaborative and safer for humans to interact with dramatically increases their utility, exposure, and potential for social interaction, opens new markets, expands creative industries, and directly locates them in highly visible public spaces. 

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2. Parenting in a Pandemic: Juggling Multiple Roles and Managing Technology Use in Family Life During COVID-19 in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3479546  

   Michelson, Rebecca; DeWitt, Akeiylah; Nagar, Ria; Hiniker, Alexis; Yip, Jason; Munson, Sean A.; Kientz, Julie A. (October 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parents' lived experiences adapting to technology's outsized role alongside other shifts in family life associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe a 10-week study with 30 enrolled families with children aged 3 to 13 in the United States using the asynchronous remote communities (ARC) methodology to 1) understand the benefits and challenges faced by families as they adapted technology at home to navigate the pandemic, and 2) to ideate improvements to those experiences through co-design. We found that amidst gaps in infrastructural support from schools, workplaces, and communities, parents experienced deep anxiety and took on new roles, including tech support, school administrator, and curator of meaningful activities for their children. As parents shared bold and creative technology-based solutions for improving family well-being, schooling experiences, social life, and beyond, they demonstrated their capacity to contribute to new models of learning and family life. Our findings are a call to action for CSCW researchers, designers, and family-focused practitioners to work with learning communities that incorporate parent, teacher, and technology experiences in their academic and community planning. 

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3. On the Way to a Framework for Evaluating Creativity in Requirements Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IRI58017.2023.00039  

   Bhowmik, Tanmay; Do, Anh Q.; Lam, Hayden; Amin, Md Rayhan; Bradshaw, Gary L.; Niu, Nan (August 2023, IEEE)

   Creativity in requirements engineering (RE) has recently emerged to help innovate “novel and useful” requirements and improve a software system’s sustainability. Existing research has mostly focused on workshops, techniques, and tools to aid creative requirements elicitation. Limited attention, however, has been dedicated to creativity evaluation, despite the current mechanisms being largely restricted to rating requirements for a broad notion of “novelty and appropriateness”. In addition, such mechanisms focus on evaluating creativity from an elicitation perspective, leaving other RE activities widely disregarded. To further advance the literature, we present a preliminary study on developing a framework that aims to evaluate creativity in a precise manner and accounts for the full spectrum of RE activities. In particular, we propose a “creative requirement diagnosis scale (CRDS)” that includes 27 indicators to assess creativity, present a novel framework to evaluate the creative merits of requirements in terms of the complete RE process, and further evaluate requirements using our framework in a study with 53 participants. The results suggest our framework’s potential to capture creativity aspects that would otherwise be undetected by traditional techniques. Our study also indicates the need for further refinement of the framework, thereby opening new avenues for creativity in RE. 

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4. ASTRID: A Robotic Tutor for Nurse Training to Reduce Healthcare-Associated Infections

   https://doi.org/10.15607/RSS.2025.XXI.090  

   Qian, Peizhu; Bajraktari, Filip; Quintero-Pena, Carlos; Meng, Qingxi; Hamlin, Shannan; Kavraki, Lydia; Unhelkar, Vaibhav (June 2025, Robotics: Science and Systems)

   Carlone, Luca; Kulic, Dana; Venture, Gentiane; Strader, Jared (Ed.)

   The central line dressing change is a life-critical procedure performed by nurses to provide patients with rapid infusion of fluids, such as blood and medications. Due to their complexity and the heavy workloads nurses face, dressing changes are prone to preventable errors that can result in central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), leading to serious health complications or, in the worst cases, patient death. In the post-COVID-19 era, CLABSI rates have increased, partly due to the heightened nursing workload caused by shortages of both registered nurses and nurse educators. To address this challenge, healthcare facilities are seeking innovative nurse training solutions to complement expert nurse educators. In response, we present the design, development and evaluation of a robotic tutoring system, ASTRID: the Automated Sterile Technique Review and Instruction Device. ASTRID, which is the outcome of a two-year participatory design process, is designed to aid in the training of nursing skills essential for CLABSI prevention. First, we describe insights gained from interviews with nurse educators and nurses, which revealed the gaps of current training methods and requirements for new training tools. Based on these findings, we outline the development of our robotic tutor, which interacts with nursing students, providing real-time interventions and summary feedback to support skill acquisition. Finally, we present evaluations of the system's performance and perceived usefulness, conducted in a simulated clinical setting with nurse participants. These evaluations demonstrate the potential of our robotic tutor in nursing education. Our work highlights the importance of participatory design for robotics systems, and motivates new avenues for foundational research in robotics. 

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5. Identifying Cognitive and Creative Support Needs for Remote Scientific Collaboration using VR: Practices, Affordances, and Design Implications

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3532797  

   Olaosebikan, Monsurat; Aranda Barrios, Claudia; Kolawole, Blessing; Cowen, Lenore; Shaer, Orit (June 2022, C&C '22: Creativity and Cognition)

   Remote scientific collaborations have been pivotal in generating scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that accelerate research in many fields. Emerging VR applications for remote work, which utilize commercially available head-mounted displays (HMDs), offer the promise to enhance collaboration, through spatial and embodied experiences. However, there is little evidence on how professionals in general, and scientists in particular, could use existing commercial VR applications to support their cognitive and creative collaborative processes while exploring real-world data as part of day-to-day collaborative work. In this paper, we present findings from an empirical study with 14 coral reef scientists, examining how they chose to utilize available resources in existing virtual environments for their ongoing data-driven collaborative research. We shed light on scientists’ data organization practices, identify affordances unique to VR for supporting cognition in a collaborative setting, and highlight design requirements for supporting cognitive and creative collaboration processes in future tools. 

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