Associate Professor of Digital Media Elizabeth “Liz” Rodwell has been awarded $267,443 by the National Science Foundation for her proposal, Designing Conversational AI Systems.
Formally trained in both media studies and anthropology, in which she holds her Ph.D., she describes the project as “an ethnography of conversational AI designers at work.”
Ethnography is the qualitative, scientific description of a people or culture acquired through fieldwork and observation, which allows Rodwell to bridge disciplines in a particularly effective way.
“I’ve adapted my research and my original program of study to the engineering and technology environment — the sort of shifting landscape where we’re at now,” she said. “I tell people I study human-computer interaction to simplify it. I’m interested in the human side of technology.
“My specialty is UX — user experience — and I was really interested in how user experience professionals were moving into conversation design,” she continued. “This is a project I started working on in 2019, so it’s changed a bit over the years, but I intend to do field work at three different companies that are leading the development of conversational AI in order to study their best practices and learn from them, as well as better understand what conversational AI work is like from the conversation design perspective.”
Conversational AI concerns technologies like virtual assistants and customer service chatbots and programming them to respond with the natural, conversational language that consumers expect and find comfortable.
“Conversation designers are the ones who essentially write the scripts; they’re the voice of the AI that ‘talks’ to us,” Rodwell explained. “They write the lines, they write the prompts, and they try to ensure that when we talk to these things, they — to the extent possible — kind of replicate a conversation with a real person. It’s a really challenging line of work.”
Her partners for the next stage of the project range from influential small groups and startups leading the discussion on conversational AI to some of the “biggest players in the industry,” and Rodwell will be visiting the Bay Area and Amsterdam, as well as making use of her previous work in Japan, to further contextualize the research.
“We’re in this new era where everyone is panicking as they try to adjust, and there’s not no reason to panic — people have made some pretty persuasive arguments about all the different ways that we could panic about it — but at the same time, panic doesn’t provide any solutions,” she said. “I think we need research that adds nuance to the conversation. The other area I’m interested in is working with partners in education and psychology to figure out how to adapt the best of these tools to help with things like language learning and speech therapy in schools.”
In addition to her immersive ethnographic research with participating firms, Rodwell will also be attending several industry conferences that would otherwise be difficult to access as someone outside of the “inner circle” of AI development; she will give a keynote address at one such conference in Barcelona next spring.