Research Groups

Center for Deliberative Democracy (CDD)

The Center for Deliberative Democracy is devoted to research about democracy and public opinion obtained through Deliberative Polling®. Developed by Professor James S. Fishkin, Deliberative Polling® is a technique which combines deliberation in small group discussions with scientific random sampling to provide public consultation for public policy and for electoral issues.

Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab

The Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab is led by Professor Clifford Nass and a team of Ph.D. students.  The vision of the laboratory is: To rapidly advance theory, assessment, and design of how people behave toward, feel about, and think about interactive media, research must be general, psychologically informed, quantitatively grounded, complimentary to partners, and near-term informed. The dominant method of the laboratory is experimental research, but we also use other methods as appropriate. The four inter-connected project groups are CARSITE (Communication with Automobiles: Research on Safety, Information Technology, and Enjoyment), EmAgIn (Embodied Agent Intelligence), LiSTeNS (Listening and Speaking Technologies: Natural and Synthetic), and SPACE (Social and Psychological Aspects of Computing Environments). Current research areas of the CHIMe lab include psychological and social aspects of pervasive/ubiquitous computing; voice and multi-modal interfaces; natural language understanding and production; context-awareness and adaptation; and robot, car, and embodied interfaces.

Political Communication Lab (PCL)

The Political Communication Lab was formed to develop and administer experimental studies of public opinion and political behavior through the use of both online and traditional methods. The advantages of online experimentation are clear in light of the explosion in the number of households with access to the Internet. Moreover, issues of sampling bias -- previously endemic to experiments -- can be overcome through the greater "reach" of online experiments and by the application of standard probability sampling techniques to the recruitment of online experimental participants. These developments significantly alleviate concerns over the generalizability of experimental research and as a result, experiments now represent a dominant methodology for political communication researchers.

Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL)

The mission of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is to understand the dynamics and implications of interactions among people in immersive virtual reality simulations (VR), and other forms of human digital representations in media, communication systems, and games. Researchers in the lab are most concerned with understanding the social interaction that occurs within the confines of VR, and the majority of our work is centered on using empirical, behavioral science methodologies to explore people as they interact in these digital worlds. However, oftentimes it is necessary to develop new gesture tracking systems, three-dimensional modeling techniques, or agent-behavior algorithms in order to answer these basic social questions. Consequently, we also engage in research geared towards developing new ways to produce these VR simulations.