Parastoo Abtahi

People form ad hoc conventions, by establishing linguistic & gestural abstractions, and shift information across speech and gesture to communicate more efficiently over time.

In our upcoming #CHI2026 paper, we study how these multimodal communications evolve in repeated physical collaboration.

Led by Kiyosu Maeda in close collaboration with @jefan@sigmoid.social, @rdhawkins@sigmoid.social, and team: William McCarthy, Ching-Yi Tsai, Jeffrey Mu, and Haoliang Wang.

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A fundamental challenge in human-robot interaction is that capabilities and limitations are often opaque to users.

In our upcoming #HRI2026 paper, X-OOHRI, led by the brilliant @laurenwang@hci.social, we use AR to make robot capabilities and limits visible during object-oriented interactions 🤖

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📣 I’m recruiting 1–2 #HCI PhD students interested in spatial computing, #AR, and #HRI. More information: https://parastooabtahi.com/applicants

If you’re interested, apply to Princeton CS by Dec 15 and mention my name in your application.

Check out Indu Panigrahi’s LBW at #CHI2025: “Interactivity x Explainability: Toward Understanding How Interactivity Can Improve Computer Vision Explanations.”

🔗 Project Page: https://ind1010.github.io/interactive_XAI
📄 Extended Abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10745