Publications (20)
Animated Public Furniture as an Interaction Mediator: Engaging Passersby In-the-Wild with Robotic Benches
Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Xin Lu +4
Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstra…
AttriMem: Attribution-Guided Process Feedback for Agent Memory Construction
Qinfeng Li, Yuntai Bao, Xinyan Yu +8
Effective memory is crucial for LLM agents, yet constructing it effectively remains challenging. A memory-construction policy decides what information to extract, store, update, co…
Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction in Shared Spaces: The Impact of Intended Path-Projection
Le Yue, Tram Thi Minh Tran, Xinyan Yu +1
External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are critical for seamless interactions between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians in shared spaces. However, they often struggle to…
RealTime QA: What's the Answer Right Now?
Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Yoichi Takahashi +7
We introduce REALTIME QA, a dynamic question answering (QA) platform that announces questions and evaluates systems on a regular basis (weekly in this version). REALTIME QA inquire…
Encouraging Bystander Assistance for Urban Robots: Introducing Playful Robot Help-Seeking as a Strategy
Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Martin Tomitsch
Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander a…
Speculating the Impacts of Mediated Social Touch Technology
Russian, Wu, Tim Moesgen +7
With growing research on haptic interfaces, Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies offer the potential to record, synthesise, and reproduce (RSR) touch experiences across space a…
Fostering Design-Policy Collaboration through Contestation: An Adversarial Futuring Method
Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Tram Thi Minh Tran +1
Emerging technologies introduce sociotechnical tensions that call for closer collaboration between technology design and policy. In this work, we introduce Design-Policy Adversaria…
Peek into the `White-Box': A Field Study on Bystander Engagement with Urban Robot Uncertainty
Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Tram Thi Minh Tran +3
Uncertainty inherently exists in the autonomous decision-making process of robots. Involving humans in resolving this uncertainty not only helps robots mitigate it but is also cruc…
Robots in the Wild: Contextually-Adaptive Human-Robot Interactions in Urban Public Environments
Xinyan Yu, Yiyuan Wang, Tram Thi Minh Tran +9
The increasing transition of human-robot interaction (HRI) context from controlled settings to dynamic, real-world public environments calls for enhanced adaptability in robotic sy…
The UnScripted Trip: Fostering Policy Discussion on Future Human-Vehicle Collaboration in Autonomous Driving Through Design-Oriented Methods
Xinyan Yu, Julie Stephany Berrio Perez, Marius Hoggenmüller +4
The rapid advancement of autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies is fundamentally reshaping paradigms of human-vehicle collaboration, raising not only an urgent need for innovative de…
One Question Answering Model for Many Languages with Cross-lingual Dense Passage Retrieval
Akari Asai, Xinyan Yu, Jungo Kasai +1
We present Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Answer Generation (CORA), the first unified many-to-many question answering (QA) model that can answer questions across many languages, even…
Envisioning Audio Augmented Reality in Everyday Life
Tram Thi Minh Tran, Soojeong Yoo, Oliver Weidlich +6
While visual augmentation dominates the augmented reality landscape, devices like Meta Ray-Ban audio smart glasses signal growing industry movement toward audio augmented reality (…
Towards Adaptive External Communication in Autonomous Vehicles: A Conceptual Design Framework
Tram Thi Minh Tran, Judy Kay, Stewart Worrall +6
External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are key to facilitating interaction between autonomous vehicles and external road actors, yet most remain reactive and do not account for…
SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Time
Qinfeng Li, Dalin He, Yuntai Bao +7
General-purpose skills promise reusable procedural knowledge for language agents, yet semantic relevance does not guarantee execution utility: a retrieved skill may encode assumpti…
Animal Interaction with Autonomous Mobility Systems: Designing for Multi-Species Coexistence
Tram Thi Minh Tran, Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller +5
Autonomous mobility systems increasingly operate in environments shared with animals, from urban pets to wildlife. However, their design has largely focused on human interaction, w…
Feel the Presence: The Effects of Haptic Sensation on VR-Based Human-Robot Interaction
Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmüller, Tram Thi Minh Tran +1
Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly utilised as a simulation tool for human-robot interaction (HRI) studies due to its ability to facilitate fast and flexible prototyping. D…
From Agent Autonomy to Casual Collaboration: A Design Investigation on Help-Seeking Urban Robots
Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Martin Tomitsch
As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they re…
Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions
Yuntai Bao, Qinfeng Li, Xinyan Yu +6
Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effec…
Understanding Pedestrian Gesture Misrecognition: Insights from Vision-Language Model Reasoning
Tram Thi Minh Tran, Xinyan Yu, Callum Parker +3
Pedestrian gestures play an important role in traffic communication, particularly in interactions with autonomous vehicles (AVs), yet their subtle, ambiguous, and context-dependent…
Uncertainty on Display: The Effects of Communicating Confidence Cues in Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions
Yue Luo, Xinyan Yu, Tram Thi Minh Tran +1
Uncertainty is an inherent aspect of autonomous vehicle (AV) decision-making, yet it is rarely communicated to pedestrians, which hinders transparency. This study investigates how…