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Abstract In August 2022, Death Valley, the driest place in North America, experienced record flooding from summertime rainfall associated with the North American monsoon (NAM). Given the socioeconomic cost of these type of events, there is a dire need to understand their drivers and future statistics. Existing theory predicts that increases in the intensity of precipitation is a robust response to anthropogenic warming. Paleoclimatic evidence suggests that northeast Pacific (NEP) sea surface temperature (SST) variability could further intensify summertime NAM rainfall over the desert southwest. Drawing on this paleoclimatic evidence, we use historical observations and reanalyzes to test the hypothesis that warm SSTs on the southern California margin are linked to more frequent extreme precipitation events in the NAM domain. We find that summers with above-average coastal SSTs are more favorable to moist convection in the northern edge of the NAM domain (southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern Great Basin). This is because warmer SSTs drive circulation changes that increase moisture flux into the desert southwest, driving more frequent precipitation extremes and increases in seasonal rainfall totals. These results, which are robust across observational products, establish a linkage between marine and terrestrial extremes, since summers with anomalously warm SSTs on the California margin have been linked to seasonal or multi-year NEP marine heatwaves. However, current generation earth system models (ESMs) struggle to reproduce the observed relationship between coastal SSTs and NAM precipitation. Across models, there is a strong negative relationship between the magnitude of an ESM’s warm SST bias on the California margin and its skill at reproducing the correlation with desert southwest rainfall. Given persistent NEP SST biases in ESMs, our results suggest that efforts to improve representation of climatological SSTs are crucial for accurately predicting future changes in hydroclimate extremes in the desert southwest. 

How are people using current smart home technologies, and how do they conceptualize future ones that are more interconnected and more capable than those available today? We deployed an online survey study to 150 participants to investigate use of and opinions about smart speakers, home robots, virtual assistants, and other smart home devices.We also gauged how impressions of connected smart home devices are shaped by the way the devices interact with one another. Through a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative approach, we found that people mostly use single devices for single functions, and have simple and brief interactions with virtual assistants. However, they imagine their future devices to have more control over the physical environment (i.e., interact with each other) and envision them interacting with people in more socially complex ways. These findings motivate design considerations and research directions for connected smart home technologies. 

People take to social media to share their thoughts, joys, and sorrows. A recent popular trend has been to support and mourn people and pets that have died as well as other objects that have suffered catastrophic damage. As several popular robots have been discontinued, including the Opportunity Rover, Jibo, and Kuri, we are interested in how language used to mourn these robots compares to that to mourn people, animals, and other objects. We performed a study in which we asked participants to categorize deidentified Twitter reactions as referencing the death of a person, an animal, a robot, or another object. Most reactions were labeled as being about humans, which suggests that people use similar language to describe feelings for animate and inanimate entities. We used a natural language toolkit to analyze language from a larger set of tweets. A majority of tweets about Opportunity included second-person ("you") and gendered third-person pronouns (she/he versus it), but terms like "R.I.P" were reserved almost exclusively for humans and animals. Our findings suggest that people verbally mourn robots similarly to living things, but reserve some language for people. 

Service robots often perform their main functions in public settings, interacting with more than one person at a time. How these robots should handle the affairs of individual users while also behaving appropriately when others are present is an open question. One option is to design for flexible agent embodiment: letting agents take control of different robots as people move between contexts. Through structured User Enactments, we explored how agents embodied within a single robot might interact with multiple people. Participants interacted with a robot embodied by a singular service agent, agents that re-embody in different robots and devices, and agents that co-embody within the same robot. Findings reveal key insights about the promise of re-embodiment and co-embodiment as design paradigms as well as what people value during interactions with service robots that use personalization. 

Human-robot interactions that involve multiple robots are becoming common. It is crucial to understand how multiple robots should transfer information and transition users between them. To investigate this, we designed a 3 x 3 mixed design study in which participants took part in a navigation task. Participants interacted with a stationary robot who summoned a functional (not explicitly social) mobile robot to guide them. Each participant experienced the three types of robot-robot interaction: representative (the stationary robot spoke to the participant on behalf of the mobile robot), direct (the stationary robot delivered the request to the mobile robot in a straightforward manner), and social (the stationary robot delivered the request to the mobile robot in a social manner). Each participant witnessed only one type of robot-robot communication: silent (the robots covertly communicated), explicit (the robots acknowledged that they were communicating), or reciting (the stationary robot said the request aloud). Our results show that it is possible to instill socialness in and improve likability of a functional robot by having a social robot interact socially with it. We also found that covertly exchanging information is less desirable than reciting information aloud. 

The inevitable increase in real-world robot applications will, consequently, lead to more opportunities for robots to have observable failures. Although previous work has explored interaction during robot failure and discussed hypothetical danger, little is known about human reactions to actual robot behaviors involving property damage or bodily harm. An additional, largely unexplored complication is the possible influence of social characteristics in robot design. In this work, we sought to explore these issues through an in-person study with a real robot capable of inducing perceived property damage and personal harm. Participants observed a robot packing groceries and had opportunities to react to and assist the robot in multiple failure cases. Prior exposure to damage and threat failures decreased assistance rates from approximately 81% to 60%, with variations due to robot facial expressions and other factors. Qualitative data was then analyzed to identify interaction design needs and opportunities for failing robots.