NSF Award
2402900
In order to be successful, engineers need to work in diverse collaborative teams. However, it is common for inequities to arise in teamwork that hurt the performance of the team. These inequities can take many forms. One team member might have fewer opportunities to share ideas. Another team member might be interrupted more often. Yet another team member might receive fewer or different tasks to complete. These types of inequities hurt team dynamics and student learning. There are technological tools available to help teams address these problems. Existing tools include online teamwork support and careful team-building. These strategies can be effective but only work before or after teams interact. Teams need in-the-moment support, especially if they are struggling. Social robots may be able to provide that support they need with models of equity. Past research in social robotics has defined equity as all members participating equally. However, a team with equal participation might be very inequitable. For example, one team member could be rejecting another team member’s ideas when they speak. This project will create an improved model of equity that can be used with a social robot. The robot will then be able to make student engineering teams more equitable. Overall, this project will help make student engineering teams more effective. It will also improve our understanding of what makes student engineering teams fair. This project helps increase the pool of engineers who can contribute to society. The knowledge gained from this research may benefit team interactions with different teams. This could have strong impacts on diversity, equity, and inclusion across STEM fields. <br/> <br/>Collaborative teams are common in the modern engineering workplace. Learning how to work well in a team is a critical skill for engineers to learn since they take on complex problems. One common challenge teams face is inequities in communication and task allocation. Engineers need to learn how to address inequities in their teams in order to be successful. Some teamwork tools already exist to support teamwork and address inequities. However, these tools rely on team members’ opinions and do not provide real-time feedback. In this project, the research team will design a social robot to promote equity in teams. This social robot will be able to observe interactions in the team to detect inequities. Then, the social robot will intervene during team meetings to address the inequities. First, the research team will observe human engineering design teams. They will use these observations to build data-driven models to detect inequities. Next, the research team will build a machine learning model to determine when a robot should intervene in a team. This model will choose when the robot should intervene based on the inequities it can detect. Also, the research team will explore what behaviors a robot can express to promote equity. These robot behaviors are new and have not yet been tested on robots. Finally, the research team will integrate the computational model with the tested robot behaviors. They will test the integrated system in an initial small-scale user study. This study will show the positive influence of the robot’s ability to promote equity in teams.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
