Bio

I'm Robin. I do research in Human-Computer Interaction at the intersection of social computing and accessibility. I ask how we can best represent disability and older age in systems. I design, build, and study systems to better support technology use (and non-use) by older adults and people with vision impairments. Most recently, I have investigated the role of accessible conversational technologies including large language models, voice assistants, and Interactive Voice Response tools, asking how these technologies support or do not support social and informational needs. My research team of postdocs and students are also working on projects related to obfuscation and AI visual access, care platforms and labor, memory and digitization, older age and digital harms, accessible large language models, and mitigating information uncertainty in conversational technologies. I am not admitting Ph.D. students for the 2025 application cycle (for students applying to start in Fall of 2026).

I am an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan's School of Information (UMSI). In 2021, I co-founded the Accessibility, HCI, and Aging (AHA!) lab across the School of Information, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and STAMPS School of Art & Design. I also hold affiliate positions in the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC, pronounced "escape"), the Digital Studies Institute (DSI), the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA), and the Insititute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI). My research has been funded by an NSF CAREER award, Google, NIH, and the Retirement Research Foundation. I have also worked at Google as a visiting researcher and held user experience research positions at Microsoft Research, Facebook, and IBM Research. And, I am a recipient of the Anita Borg Early Career Award awarded by the Computing Research Association.

I was awarded a President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan and hold a Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University, M.S. in Human-Centered Computing from UMBC, and B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

What's New?

April 2025 - Led, by Hira Jamshed, we will present our paper on accessible audio nudge design and the role of disruptiveness in accessbility at CHI 2025. Led by Sam Ankenbauer, we will also present our case study on the challenges of recruiting older adults in a study about scams.

February 2025 - I was awarded the 2025 Henry Russell award, the highest award the University of Michigan grants to early- and mid-career faculty.

January 2025 - Led by Sam Ankenbauer, our paper on remembering and forgetting research in HCI was presented GROUP 2025.

November 2024 - Led by Sam Ankenbauer, we presented our paper on older adults' physical and digital curation practices at CSCW 2024. Led by Austin Toombs, we also hosted a SIG on future dialogues with personal assistants at CSCW.

October 2024 - Led by Rahaf Alharbi, we presented our paper classifying errors made with visual access technologies and strategies Blind people use to assess AI output at ASSETS 2024.

May 2024 - Led by John Rudnik, our paper on prototyping voice technologies for care relationships was presented at CHI 2024 and won an Honorable Mention award!

November 2023 - We published a ToCHI paper on voice community (non)use by blind and low vision older adults and a JASIST paper on information uncertainty with voice assistants.

July 2023 - Led by Bruna Oewel and Tawfiq Ammari, our paper analyzing more than 600,000 queries older adults made to Alexa devices and categorizing how they used voice assistants for social purposes won a best paper award at CUI 2023!