Laura Stegner
PhD Candidate studying Human-Robot Interaction
University of Wisconsin–Madison
stegner [at] wisc [dot] edu
About Me
I am a Cisco Distinguished Graduate Fellow and 6th year PhD Candidate in the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the People and Robots Laboratory. My research is at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Healthcare. Motivated by global challenges posed by increasing caregiver shortages, I seek to design, build, and evaluate intelligent systems (e.g., robots) that support complex tasks in healthcare environments. My dissertation investigates the specific use case of integrating care robots into assisted living facilities. My work makes scientific contributions of new methods, tools, systems, and knowledge, and I also engage the local community to bring robots into the real world.
My research is published in top-tier international conferences for HCI and robotics (e.g., CHI, HRI, DIS). My work and impact are also recognized through awards such as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and have been showcased at premiere forums such as the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.
Before grad school, I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2019. Part of our degree program included five co-operative education experiences, exposing me to a variety of industry and research positions.
In the summers of 2018 and 2019, I worked as an intern at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, supervised by Aman Mathur and Dr. Rupak Majumdar. We developed Paracosm, a test framework for autonomous driving simulations, published at FASE 2021.
I am seeking tenure-track faculty positions, post-doctoral fellowships, and other full-time researcher opportunities!
Recent News
- Nov 2024 - Wonderful visit to George Washington University, hosted by Dr. Chung Hyuk Park.
- Nov 2024 - Co-organized the 2024 AAAI Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development.
- Jul 2024 - Amazing week as a student volunteer at DIS '24 in Copenhagen: co-organized the RoboCare Design Workshop, co-presented our evaluation of Tabula, and cheered Yaxin Hu as she presented our work on designing for remote tele-experience for older adults.
- Jun 2024 - Returning to the Naval Research Lab for another internship with Dr. Laura Hiatt!
- May 2024 - Honored to be named a recipient of the Cisco Distinguished Graduate Fellowship for the 2024-25 academic year.
Older News
- May 2024 - Extremely proud of undergraduate researchers Mary Kristjanson and Shanshan Li for presenting their work at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium!
- May 2024 - Virtual talk at National University of Singapore, hosted by Dr. Harold Soh.
- Mar 2024 - Co-organized the End-User Development for Human-Robot Interaction workshop at HRI'24.
- Nov 2023 - I passed my preliminary exam!
- Oct 2023 - Visit to The Health, Aging, and Technology (THAT) Lab at University of Maryland.
- Oct 2023 - Co-organized the 2023 AAAI Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development and presented my work.
- Oct 2023 - Visit to Intuitive Computing Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
- Sep 2023 - Presented my research at the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg, Germany.
- Jun 2023 - Started my internship at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, working with Dr. Laura Hiatt.
- May 2023 - Presented in the Summer Speaker Series at MIRRORLab (virtual).
- Apr 2023 - Situated Participatory Design Paper presented at CHI'23.
- Apr 2023 - Invited talk at the National Robotarium and Edinburgh Centre for Robotics in Edinburgh, Scotland.
- Mar 2023 - Tabula Paper presented at HRI'23.
- Jun 2022 - Designing for Caregiving Paper presented at DIS'22.
- May 2021 - Figaro Paper presentation at CHI'21.
- May 2020 - Excited to announce I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
- Aug 2019 - Starting my graduate studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Research Areas
Please refer to my Google Scholar profile for an up-to-date list of all of my publications.
Understanding Care Needs
The combination of a rapidly aging population and growing shortage of caregivers had led to the rise in interest for assistive robots to help care for older adults and other vulnerable populations. This work seeks to understand how care robots can integrate into existing caregiving ecosystems. By understanding the needs and challenges of the end users, we can design, implement, and deploy more robust systems that have real-world use and validity.
- Selected Papers:
- [CHI '23] Situated Participatory Design: A Method for In Situ Design of Robotic Interaction with Older Adults
- Laura Stegner, Emmanuel Senft, Bilge Mutlu
- PDF - Video - Presentation - OSF
- [DIS '22] Designing for Caregiving: Integrating Robotic Assistance in Senior Living Communities
- Laura Stegner, Bilge Mutlu
- PDF - Presentation - OSF
Building Novel End-User Programming Interfaces
As robots become more commonly used in everyday scenarios, a wide range of individuals will need appropriate tools to easily and efficiently create programs that specify what their robot should do or how it should behave. This work seeks to make programming human robot interactions more natural for non-roboticists by employing programming language techniques, such as program synthesis, to translate multimodal user input into a full robot program.
- Selected Papers:
- [DIS '24] Understanding On-the-Fly End-User Robot Programming
- Laura Stegner*, Yuna Hwang*, David Porfirio, Bilge Mutlu | * Equal contribution
- PDF - Video - Teaser - OSF
- [HRI '23] Sketching Robot Programs On the Fly
- David Porfirio, Laura Stegner, Maya Cakmak, Allison Sauppé, Aws Albarghouthi, Bilge Mutlu
- PDF - Video - Presentation - Github - OSF
- [CHI '21] Figaro: A Tabletop Authoring Environment for Human-Robot Interaction
- David Porfirio, Laura Stegner, Maya Cakmak, Allison Sauppé, Aws Albarghouthi, Bilge Mutlu
- PDF - Video - Presentation - Github