About Me

I am a Cisco Distinguished Graduate Fellow and 6th year PhD Candidate in the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the People and Robots Laboratory. My research is at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Healthcare. Motivated by global challenges posed by increasing caregiver shortages, I seek to design, build, and evaluate intelligent systems (e.g., robots) that support complex tasks in healthcare environments. My dissertation investigates the specific use case of integrating care robots into assisted living facilities. My work makes scientific contributions of new methods, tools, systems, and knowledge, and I also engage the local community to bring robots into the real world.

My research is published in top-tier international conferences for HCI and robotics (e.g., CHI, HRI, DIS). My work and impact are also recognized through awards such as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and have been showcased at premiere forums such as the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

Before grad school, I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2019. Part of our degree program included five co-operative education experiences, exposing me to a variety of industry and research positions.

In the summers of 2018 and 2019, I worked as an intern at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, supervised by Aman Mathur and Dr. Rupak Majumdar. We developed Paracosm, a test framework for autonomous driving simulations, published at FASE 2021.

I have successfully defended my dissertation, and I am excited to begin my next position as Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University! Stay tuned for more updates.

Research Areas

Please refer to my Google Scholar profile for an up-to-date list of all of my publications.

robot

Understanding Care Needs

The combination of a rapidly aging population and growing shortage of caregivers had led to the rise in interest for assistive robots to help care for older adults and other vulnerable populations. This work seeks to understand how care robots can integrate into existing caregiving ecosystems. By understanding the needs and challenges of the end users, we can design, implement, and deploy more robust systems that have real-world use and validity.

Selected Papers:
[CHI '23] Situated Participatory Design: A Method for In Situ Design of Robotic Interaction with Older Adults: Laura Stegner, Emmanuel Senft, Bilge Mutlu; PDF - Video - Presentation - OSF
[DIS '22] Designing for Caregiving: Integrating Robotic Assistance in Senior Living Communities: Laura Stegner, Bilge Mutlu; PDF - Presentation - OSF

robot

Building Novel End-User Programming Interfaces

As robots become more commonly used in everyday scenarios, a wide range of individuals will need appropriate tools to easily and efficiently create programs that specify what their robot should do or how it should behave. This work seeks to make programming human robot interactions more natural for non-roboticists by employing programming language techniques, such as program synthesis, to translate multimodal user input into a full robot program.

Selected Papers:
[DIS '24] Understanding On-the-Fly End-User Robot Programming: Laura Stegner*, Yuna Hwang*, David Porfirio, Bilge Mutlu | * Equal contribution; PDF - Video - Teaser - OSF
[HRI '23] Sketching Robot Programs On the Fly: David Porfirio, Laura Stegner, Maya Cakmak, Allison Sauppé, Aws Albarghouthi, Bilge Mutlu; PDF - Video - Presentation - Github - OSF
[CHI '21] Figaro: A Tabletop Authoring Environment for Human-Robot Interaction: David Porfirio, Laura Stegner, Maya Cakmak, Allison Sauppé, Aws Albarghouthi, Bilge Mutlu; PDF - Video - Presentation - Github

About Me

Recent News

Research Areas

Understanding Care Needs

Building Novel End-User Programming Interfaces