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 voice communities through voice assistants and Interactive Voice Response tools and 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 2024 application cycle (for students applying to start in Fall of 2025).

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.

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?

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

July 2024 - I was awarded the Henry Russell award, recognizing notable research contributions for select early- to mid-career faculty.

June 2024 - Led by Sam Ankenbauer, our lit review on remembering and forgetting research in HCI was accepted to GROUP 2025. Also, led by Rahaf Alharbi, our paper classifying errors made with visual access technologies and strategies Blind people use to assess AI output was accepted to ASSETS 2024.

May 2024 - Led by John Rudnik, our paper on prototyping voice technologies for care relationships was presented at CHI 2024.

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.

October 2023 - Led by Lauren Wilcox, our CSCW paper using consent forms as a design fiction receive an honorable mention award and methods recognition.

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!

June 2023 - I was named as the 2023 recipient of the Anita Borg Early Career Award by the Computing Research Association.

April 2023 - We had three papers accepted to FAccT. Topics include how: (1) LLMs discuss disability, (2) Black older adults describe fairness with voice technologies, and (3) care values are enacted in algorithms for older adults' caregivers

February 2023 - Led by Pooja Upadhyay and Sharaon Heung, our paper on older adults in assisted living communities long-term voice assistant use was accepted to CHI 2023