For some reason, many of my favorite conferences tend to clump together in time -- CSCW, HRI, CHI. I just returned from presenting at CSCW 2010 (Savannah, GA), with a great stop at Texas A&M to visit Robin Murphy and her crew, when I jumped onto another plane for HRI 2010 (Osaka) to host a workshop and present a paper and panel talk about Willow Garage. While in Osaka, we took a day trip to Kyoto to check out the Japanese monkeys at Iwatayama, where the humans go into a cage and the monkeys come to poke at us (pictured to the left); how appropriate.

2009 is whizzing by and has been filled with yet more big transitions. In my research at Willow Garage, I've been translating as much as I can from my experiences in human-computer interaction to human-robot interaction, primarily working on non-verbal robot behaviors such as respecting personal spaces and being expressive, using lessons from animation techniques. My latest CSCW paper (based on one study from my dissertation) has been nominated for best paper and we will be publishing our latest HRI experiment on user expectations of personal robots at HRI 2010 in Osaka. In my personal life, I got married in October, honeymooned in Costa Rica (pictured) in December, and am now getting back to a much less hectic everyday life.

In the coming months, I'll be completely redoing this web space under my new domain name: http://www.leilatakayama.org. If you'd like to link to me from now on, please use this new name instead of my expired Stanford URL.

If you're an HRI researcher or artist working with robots and people, I'd like to invite you to participate in our workshop on HRI and the arts! Bill Smart, Annamaria Pileggi, and I are hosting this HRI 2010 full-day workshop in Osaka, March 2. Just have a glance over the workshop page and let me know if you have any questions or would like to bounce ideas for good discussion topics to bring to the table. Submission are due January 15, 2010.