Leila Takayama

• Senior Researcher
  Google

Leila Takayama joined Willow Garage in January 2009 as a Research Scientist in the area of human-robot interaction. With a background in Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction, her current focus is understanding human encounters with robots in terms of how they perceive, understand, feel about, and interact with robots. Among other things, she is working on teaching the robots some manners. Her research interests include embodied cognition and the social and cognitive psychology of interacting with non-human agents. She is interested in how people come to feel that their tools are invisible-in-use (e.g., tele-operated robots) and potentially change their perspectives on the world. She also studies how people engage with non-human agents (e.g., autonomous robots). Though her primary method of inquiry is controlled experiments, she is constantly expanding her methodological toolkit by learning and using field studies, surveys, interviews, archival studies, etc., depending upon what is most effective for addressing the research questions at hand. Dr. Takayama completed her PhD in the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) lab at Stanford University in June 2008, advised by Professor Clifford Nass. She also holds a PhD minor in Psychology from Stanford, MA in Communication from Stanford, and BAs in Psychology and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley (2003). During her graduate studies, she was a research assistant in the User Interface Research (UIR) group at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Her thesis, titled Throwing Voices: Investigating the Psychological Effects of the Spatial Location of Projected Voices, won the Nathan Maccoby dissertation award. Before joining Willow Garage, she was a research scientist at Nokia Research Center