The reality we experience is not something we create alone. Food tends to taste better when we eat with others, and we often eat more as well. Our mood can shift in response to another person's facial expressions or tone of voice. Who we are with, and how, shapes our perception, emotions, and judgments.
Technology is profoundly changing what it means to be together. In avatar-mediated communication, we can interact with others while changing our own and their appearance, facial expressions, and voices. We can now spend time with people far away as if we were in the same place. We also increasingly collaborate with non-human entities such as AI agents. How our experiences and behaviors change within these new forms of co-presence is still not well understood.
We study the mechanisms that shape the quality of experiences arising from being with others, and we apply these mechanisms in engineering to design better communication and collaboration. This area also includes research on technologies that influence social interaction and group decision-making.
