Alesia Gainer
Papers
5
Total Citations
79
H-Index
4
About
Alesia Gainer is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction, specializing in how social dialogue, rapport-building, and conversational errors shape trust and influence between humans and autonomous agents. Her most-cited work, “Getting to Know Each Other” (2018, 57 citations), reveals a nuanced finding: social dialogue can both mitigate and exacerbate trust loss when robots make conversational mistakes, using a NAO robot to persuade users in ranking tasks. This contribution is foundational for designing more resilient and trustworthy social robots. Gainer’s broader research spans multimodal interaction, human-swarm teaming, and collaborative dialogue, as seen in her development of the Niki and Julie Corpus—a platform combining a robot and virtual human to study social influence across varied scenarios. Her work on human-swarm interaction (2020) introduces innovative concepts like “plays” and “audibles” for real-time robot coordination, alongside a virtual spokesperson to bridge human-agent communication. With a career marked by rigorous experimentation and practical frameworks, Gainer’s insights are critical for engineers and designers building robots that must navigate the delicate balance of social connection and error recovery in real-world settings.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Getting to Know Each Other57 citations · 2018
- 2The Role of Social Dialogue and Errors in Robots11 citations · 2017
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